As of today, we’re starting a weekly activity where we post on each Wednesday an article that you may find useful, today I’m going to be answering the following questions: what’s going on with the classifieds industry? Is it a good time to start?
Latest news:
This idea came to me when I have been checking the classifieds news for the past couple of months, Starting with Milanuncios sold for 50m EUR then Quickr raising 90m USD followed by Lamudi and Carmudi raising for their capital 7m and 10m USD each respectively, and finally with the last sale of auto.ru for 178m USD. All this had got me thinking, is it actually profitable to start a classifieds website right now with all of those big players already in the game?
Classifieds vs Miley Cyrus
So I started to look for some facts and played around with Google trends analysis, just to get an idea of what’s going on. Google trends analysis is a tool that helps you see how popular a certain word has been over a period of time. And I started by comparing the trend of the word “classifieds” with “Miley Cyrus” :) to see how popular that keyword is, I picked the word classifieds because who would use it in a search engine? mostly it would be people just like myself thinking of starting a classifieds business or actually searching for a classifieds website.
And here is what I found:
As it seems from the chart, “classifieds” is actually losing its popularity (compared to twerking of course!) which is considered a good thing, it could mean that the number of people interested in starting a classifieds website is getting lower and compared to the 5th most popular person on google trends then I believe it’s not so popular.
Then, I thought I would take this to another level and I added two more keywords: “Amazon” and “Craigslist” when I did this I was really surprised with what I found:
As you can see in the chart right now Amazon and Craigslist are almost at the same level, while that has not been the case for the past 10 years. Also don’t mind the peaks with amazon as they’re due to holiday seasons (their latest record break was the holiday season last December)
So, what does this mean to me and you? well it doesn’t mean much, since what I used is not considered much of a valid research tool but looking at the news and the charts we could get some indicators:
– Competition on creating new classifieds websites is relatively low
– Investors interest in classified ads websites is increasing
– There is a lot of cash in the industry
What we recommend:
The best part about this is that it’s not too late! you see, there are some untapped markets out there that you can be the first to conquer. From what the team and I have seen on classifieds websites there are two main principles:
1- First come first serve.
2- Have good media exposure and you have the market.
Which means you need to start with a specific niche or sector (maybe even a language) that has not been penetrated yet (or has little competition) and then tap into the media and get yourself known (I’ve written an article earlier about promoting a classifieds website you can find it here)
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