Online classifieds battle heating up in Singapore
There has been a lot of activity in the online world from SPH, who recently started Mocca (an EBay clone) and ST701 (a search engine clone). Our resident contributor, Der Shing, one of our resident contributors and co-founder of JobsFactory, provides an overview about how the online classified battles are heating up in Singapore.
Contributed by Der Shing
There has been a lot written on new internet businesses based on concepts like social networking, aggregation, mash ups etc. Singapore too has seen its fair share of such businesses but I think I am right to say that they are still very nascent and I do not know of any local ones with meaningful revenues. Except maybe xiaxue which is an excellent spunky site!
However, I do see a large battle coming up in the online classifieds space. See the number of online classifieds mass media ads running - ST701, Mocca, JobsDB, Jobstreet, JobsCentral, Monster etc. I predict much more to come.
I have always felt this space warrants attention but so far few players have come in to do it. Online classifieds can be very profitable even in a small city like Singapore. I estimate the whole cars, jobs, real estate, buy/sell market is worth at least S$40M this year in online classifieds alone and it is poised to grow dramatically once someones figures out how to handle more than 1 vertical at a time.
Who are the players?
- Real Estate - No clear player yet. So this space is wide open for someone to come in and make good$$.
- Jobs - 5 main players. Combined at about 15M revenue by my estimate. (monster, jobscentral, jobsdb, jobstreet, 701)
- Cars - sgcarmart, onemotoring
- Buy/sell - Mocca, Yahoo!, EBay
- Personals - Fridae, Trevvy (all Gay sites though)… where is the local large personals for straight population?
I think in the next 3 years, you will see lots more ads, lots more competition and the winner will start to emerge. Ultimately, I feel newspaper classifieds should shrink as more people see the benefits of online classifieds with its unlimited space, search engines and transactional capability. So to all the readers who are keen on internet businesses, i think online classifieds will grow at about 30% per year min. With margins of 20+%, to me it is a very attractive business.
Readers, What is your take on this?
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9 Comments, Comment or Ping
wannapreneur
I’m actually quite keen to see how Mocca’s long term strategy against the other two “trading” sites - Yahoo! and eBay. In terms of features/reach, it loses out to eBay which is well established globally with a large network of users and has many useful features. In terms of costs (once their promotional free launch period is over), they will face the same problem as eBay Singapore in trying to go head on with Yahoo! which is essentially free.
Seems to me like SPH’s tactics in cyberspace to have always been to throw tons of money into marketing and hoping that something works. I don’t think this is going to work.
Aug 11th, 2007
Vinod
Real estate player comin up soon… very very soon :)
Aug 11th, 2007
encik wan
If online classified is going mainstream, does that mean only well-capitalized new players can try, e.g. compete on marketing?
Aug 12th, 2007
wonderdoggy
Vinod, yes i remember you mentioning something like that. You were the one I met at a networking event couple of months ago right?
All the best! let us know your URL when it is up? Would love to see it and if it works well, we should collaborate with each other.
As for whether u need money and resources for online classifieds. My experience says not a lot. We started with just 20K and raised that to 200K only 2 years later. Of course having more money always helps. And if your vertical is a crowded one, then of course u need to market harder to standout from the incumbents. So for jobs now, u need to spend some decent moolah. Based on my exp, u need about 100K on marketing to at least make some impact over 1 year. Jobs is too saturated now with mind share going to the top players to work on a viral way very well.
But if your vertical is something no-one is big in yet, i think can get away with viral. See sgcarmart. They grow very much over 4 years and since they were in an emptier space, it could be done with minimal marketing $$.
Aug 13th, 2007
wonderdoggy
ermm. bernard, just noticed your intro has an error. Mocca is by mediacorp, not SPH.
Aug 13th, 2007
DasherKua
we need a real estate search engine/portal/marketplace that is different from other crappy sites like nationproperty, singapuraproperty, propertyzone etc.etc.
all these websites over-clutter their websites with stupid irrelevant ads and have so many bogus listings.
we need something clean, simple, neat and powerful for our booming real estate market in sg!
Aug 14th, 2007
TK
yeah…maybe we should just stick to the old fashion newspaper classfied ads. though i always get a headache looking at them and their micro size fonts.
Aug 15th, 2007
Michelle
Nice writeout. Just to add something not known to most, a group of Singaporeans had developed a classifieds site since 1999 - http://www.ablewise.com - but it is targetted at the world. It is very popular in some western countries like the States and Australia, and has been a competitor with huge sites like usfreeads, olx, kijiji and craiglist for years. From a friend that works inside Ablewise, they have been profitable for the past 5 years.
Aug 21st, 2007
Classified
The only reason why sgcarmart can go above singaporecarsonline.com who was then the leading car website is because singaporecarsonline.com design needs a improvement, may be they are doing something about it now, but there are many car websites are out and they are not spending money to fight it out and if they don’t spend money to fight it out then they will remain unknown, they need to spend money like mocca and st701 to make themselves known otherwise be forever free and nobody really bothers. I estimate they need to spend at least few hundred thosuands to market themselves to make themselves known. Everything needs money lah
Sep 9th, 2008
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