Online classified ad site expands footprint in Pakistan

New York-based company searching for country manager.

KARACHI:

OLX, the world’s second most visited online classified advertisement site, is gearing up to expand its operations in Pakistan as it is looking to hire a country manager and set up an office four years after entry into the Pakistani market.

The business, according to the chief of the New York-based free online classifieds giant, has already clicked and is set to grow.

“We have 2.2 million unique users every month in Pakistan right now,” founder and Co-CEO Fabrice Grinda said in response to queries through an email. OLX is the largest classifieds site in Pakistan by far, he claimed.

In Pakistan, Grinda said, OLX is currently making money from Adsense, a keyword advertising system that allows websites to monetise their content via Google ads. The company’s Pakistan chapter does not have a billing system in place for selling featured ads.

“We are currently considering hiring a local country manager to manage PR, advertising sales, content acquisition, etc,” Grinda said. The company is also running an ad campaign during prime time on local news channels.

Unlike rival Craigslist, the world’s most visited online classifieds site that dominates the US and western Europe, OLX is more focused on emerging markets, catering to the demand of 96 countries in 45 languages.

Naspers, a South African media company, owns a majority stake in OLX that has 200 employees, most of whom operate from a centralised location in Buenos Aires, Argentina, catering to about 150 million visitors per month, said Grinda, the rest is owned by the management including his partner who is an Argentine national.

Distinguishing between Craigslist’s and OLX’s model, Grinda said the former makes money by charging professionals for placing ads in real estate and jobs while the latter is committed to staying free.

“We make money by integrating a few non-obtrusive text ads on the site and by selling a few premium placements on the home page and search results page,” he said. Craigslist did not respond to the email seeking comments.

In 2009, the company’s fourth year, OLX became the world’s second most visited online classifieds property expecting $10 million in revenues, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in December 2009. The same report cited OLX to be a competitor of Craigslist that single-handedly replaced the classifieds business of newspapers in the US.

Grinda refused to disclose 2011 revenues, however, he said the business with focus on emerging markets is doing well.

Operating in Pakistan since 2007, OLX, according to Grinda, is dominating the country’s online classifieds market now. OLX is the 18th largest site in Pakistan according to Alexa, a website that provides information about top websites, internet traffic and relevant statistics.

Talking about growth in Pakistan, Grinda said, “We gambled and it just took off.” While Grinda associates OLX growth in Pakistan to luck, there are forces driving this growth not only for OLX but also for a host of other businesses.

According to the Internet Service Providers Association of Pakistan, the country has about 1.4 million broadband users and the number is increasing every day. Internet users, according to ISPAK, are estimated at around 20 million.

One-third of Pakistan’s population of around 180 million comprises the middle-income group going for quality products, thanks to rising incomes and literacy rate as well as penetration of technology.

Asked if they are facing any competition in Pakistan, he said there is not really a large free horizontal classifieds site focusing on Pakistan at this time. “So I am not sure we have direct competition, but we face indirect competition from newspapers and others,” he added.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 21^st, 2012.