Craigslist Competitor OLX Raises $13.5M

April 11th, 2008 at 5:44 pm

He’s right. No one has heard of it.

April 11th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

lol huh? What genius created the name

April 11th, 2008 at 6:21 pm

Nice work grinda and good luck!
The big fat huge elephant in craigslist servers that no one ever talks about is the amount of spam you get every time you list or even when you reply to a spam (dressed as a listing)
I used to use Craigslist everyday, no more.. ill try OLX, i hope its not rampant with spam.
thanks!

April 11th, 2008 at 6:31 pm

OLX Raises $13.5M very much

April 11th, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Zizi: Spam/scam is a problem with all free classified site because we’re free and easy to use. The easiest way to solve it is to charge, but obviously that would defeat the purpose. We never intend to charge for listings.

We do our best to limit it through a combination of community feedback, manual review, blacklisting, etc. and are still working on our silver bullet. We have a few cards up our sleeve. Hopefully it will be much better in 6 months or so.

Fabrice

April 11th, 2008 at 7:01 pm

100% free to list. The business model is advertising. We currently monetize using Google AdSense.

It works rather well for 2 reasons:
1. Behavior: users are looking for something hence click on the ads if they are relevant.
2. Our top categories - jobs, real estate, cars, merchandise sale - have high CPMs

We will probably introduce featured listings in a few months where people will be able to promote their ads. We do not intend to ever charge to post

April 11th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

Congrats to OLX. It´s great news for a company headquartered in Palermo Valley, Argentina.

April 11th, 2008 at 8:21 pm

Hope everything goes well for OLX.

I do agree with you that not many people have heard of craigslist outside of the US. I live in Korea and many here haven’t heard of it.

April 11th, 2008 at 9:19 pm

I’m a craigslist FAN since 1999. I meet my girlfriend on CL, bought and sold many items and ended up accidently creating a photo hosing service before there were photo hosting services, needless to say “but I just did” I have watched them grow. I do wish OLX the best of luck, and they might do well where craigslist is not, but they’ll have to move fast. Recently I read that Craigslist is making north of 100 million per year http://tinyurl.com/3xbxuj , I have no Idea how true this is, but with his what is it 19 employees, and massive cash reserves and 10+ years of dealing with everything that is the online world. Craig if he wanted to could really turn it on. You don’t think so? Remember this, Craig thought of craigslist, you didn’t. For example he could partner with all newspapers, and there are a host of features that he could add. Basically over night he could double or triple. The only way to beat him is to buy him, “that’s my guess” At the end of the day, raising money to compete against a free service seems just seems crazy. And trust me, I know crazy.

April 11th, 2008 at 9:36 pm

Some after thoughts for OLX’s success.

Fabrice, is an extremely talented individual, listen to his podcast on Greg’s site http://ventureVoice.com, I love how he took two years off after his euro/eBay company to decide on what to do next. I think he has a list of nine requirements before he’ll do a business and its very compelling. My guess on how this might all play out over the next two years. OLX will dominate the area’s where craigslist is not. Craig will either be acquired or be in the process “my guess”, the buyer is somebody huge like Merdoc or Google will just keep throwing Billions at him until he capitulates, then they’ll snap ut the other major players. OLX will return a hefty return for the investor and Fabrice can add another success to his list.

April 11th, 2008 at 9:41 pm

why exactly do they need almost 100 employees for a basic classifieds site?

April 11th, 2008 at 9:55 pm

Andrew:

The bulk of the employees are in the customer service and scam/spam fighting department. If we were only in English we would have many fewer employees, but we need at least two employees per language and we are in 15 languages right now (we over 20 new languages planned).

April 11th, 2008 at 10:00 pm

Makes sense, i guess thats the cost of internationalization. You seem to have a lot of real estate listed which doesn’t seem proportional to the other categories…I’m guessing you are tapping into the MLS or something?

April 11th, 2008 at 10:07 pm

Andrew:

The categories we are strong in vary dramatically by country, either because of the competitive environment or for some random reason.

In the US, we seem to do well in real estate because:
* Most competing sites charge
* Many real estate brokers have feeds they can easily send us via XML which we accept (and Craigslist does not)

We are not directly tapped into the MLS, but the brokers which post on OLX are.

It’s not surprising we don’t do well in categories like Personals in the US. Craigslist already covers the market extremely well.

In India we seem to be strong in personals because there are not many alternative dating sites. It really varies based on the market conditions.

April 11th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

If Craigslist does a better job handling spam they’ll have a much stronger position in the market and won’t have to worry about newcomers muscling them out.

April 11th, 2008 at 10:34 pm

Boosting listing nubmers by NEVER deleting old crap:

Acer cs-5530 digital camera=$150
Cameras - Camera Accessories - Albany, NY -

80 weeks ago

April 12th, 2008 at 12:09 am

too many spam links on the site… interesting design though.. although CL is full of spam and fake ads as well… Lots of VC money to sponsor a lot of spam. Welcome to web 2.0

April 12th, 2008 at 12:15 am

OLX == DOA

I can appreciate Fabrice defending his baby, but let’s face it. You don’t have a chance. You have 3 times the staff of Craig, place ads that are annoying as hell in the the most annoying place on the page. Face it Craig is better and Craig makes a market in all these niches. You have no traction. Loquo dominates Spain. I predict long boring fade out to black for OLX. Wake us when it’s over.

April 12th, 2008 at 2:31 am

Craig open market for most of the niche but it still look traditional, I think they should make it more feature rich for professional marketers.

April 12th, 2008 at 5:34 am

Congrats Fabrice!

April 12th, 2008 at 7:08 am

Great news for those fed up with Craigslist. Sign me up!

April 12th, 2008 at 7:51 am

I question this:

If I am a advertiser, and I place an ad on OLX. And OLX is placing eye-ball competing (read contextual) adsense ads besides my classifieds listing. Does this make sense for me to spend time advertising on OLX?

True, if make sense for the user as it offers options, but again the alternative options should be towards the other similiar classifieds on the site.

For the advertiser, I guess other than free, their time are spend generating pages for OLX to place more adsense boxes.

April 12th, 2008 at 8:58 am

MrCrashyCash: If we can go public they will allow me not to sell

April 12th, 2008 at 10:28 am

Fabrice,

I am rooting for you.

To the skeptics out there - Joel and Jeremy would not be pouring more money into the business if it were not prospering.

April 12th, 2008 at 10:48 am

Congratulations to the whole team of OLX.

I know most of their team and they kick ass! Great job guys!

April 12th, 2008 at 10:54 am

Marc:

I hear your skepticism. However, classfieds are a $100 billion a year business globally. There is room for more than one player.

Also, in Spain and Latin America we do have traction. Compare our Alexa (that of http://www.mundoanuncio.com) to that of Loquo.com…

April 12th, 2008 at 11:00 am

Ablewise:

The ads from Google (3 at the top and 3 at the bottom of the listings and search pages) should not be more competitive to your ad than all the others ads on the page from competing sellers. In fact they are usually less competitive because they promote a concept (an entire site) rather than the exact product you are advertising.

Also we don’t charge you anything for it - even if you are a professional and we accept feeds.

April 12th, 2008 at 11:21 am

Hi friends,

Before nothing, i (as part of the OLX team) want to give you the thanks for all the feedback and for your interest in our project: both critics and greetings are welcome (we are very sure of what we are trying to do here and we are happy with our mission and vision…However we ALWAYS LOVE TO HEAR..This is internet!: if you don´t hear you loose).

YouYap.com: i like what you say about: “How will you compete with something that is FREE”…That´s a really good question. But don´t get us wrong in relation with that point: like Fabrice said it´s important that you understund that as today we are not loosing our dream thinking in how will we do to beat Craigslist in the U.S.. Again…We love Craigslist and we know that they are the LEADERS IN THE U.S.
When we raised money from our investors we didn´t asked them: “Hi guys…Do you know Craigslist?…Well…We want to take their cake…Their are making a lot of money in the U.S. and we think we can beat them in 1 or 2 years”…Our goal is not the U.S….We are a global company with a global project and (always knowing that we would love to be successful in the U.S.) we are trying to offer a great transactional experience/alternative all over the world (Craigslist is not the leader everywhere and THERE is where we see a great opportunity both for users and for us). However, on another hand, do you remember when Altavista was one of the leaders in online search? :-P…Nothing is impossible in this world. I will recommend you this interesting article from Fabrice´s blog: http://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=246

Johnyzar: well…A lot of things…Paying salaries (this point is not a “childs game”….We are 100 employees aprox. and that represents A LOT OF MONEY year by year), hiring the best people in our regions. Like you may know, we invest in online advertising, etc. And the most important thing is that we will be able to continue investing in technology and infrastructure (an example of this could be our Mobile version in which we are working very hard).
On another hand, with some of our budget, if we think that it would empower our business we will be able to make strategic acquisitions and partnerships too.

Marc: :-)…We defend a baby in who we trust 100% (we are not blind or something like that…We think that we face a REAL big challenge and we are committed in giving a GREAT AND FREE alternative to our users). In relation with Spain, we think that Loquo does a great job but one of our companies, MundoAnuncio.com, does it too and the brand has a REALLY BIG penetration in Spain. Btw, Loquo is not the only big player…Segundamano is absolutely huge too.

Yakov: thanks a lot for your clean perspective and for covering us in the Quintura´s blog. I really love the work you are doing with Quintura!. Are you coming to Buenos Aires one of these days?

Gaston: thanks a lot!!!…Congratulations on Geelbe too! (i heard you are about to launch).

Webhosting Advice : we are working very hard on it. That´s one of our challenges and THESE are the kind of things that make us loose our dream (our product, our service, not if Craigslist is the leader in the U.S.).

To finish with my post i would like to leave a great thought that i heard time ago from a friend of mine. It says something like this but i don´t remember how exactly it was:
“There are three types of people in this world
1 - Great people talk about ideas,
2 - Normal people talk about things, (This is how the phrase was but i don´t like this bullet too much because everybody talks about things).
3 - Mediocre people talk about other people.”

At OLX, we like to think that we are englobed into the first type of people (despite we talk about things too :-P). We KNOW that we are just another group of people trying to make things happen and we are not blind at all (we know that Craigslist is the absolute leader in the U.S., for example…It´s our business, not a game…We know the worldwide leaders and players). But we really love our baby and we think we are a great team, with a great vision, and facing a huge global oportunity.

We don´t really spend our day to day talking about Craigslist because we are too busy performing our own product in which we believe.

Thanks again for all friends!

We will be here responding!

Alexis.

April 12th, 2008 at 1:48 pm

This is great! Finally, someone to humble the great CL. You can’t stay arrogant forever.

April 12th, 2008 at 9:23 pm

I think, if there was a google when at the begining it was yahoo.
Why couldn’t OLX do it well?

April 13th, 2008 at 2:35 am

Fabrice I’m very happy for your funding this is a very good news for all of us. As you know I own a classified site in Italy that compete with Kijiji and italian Schibstedt’s site. I don’t think that it will be place, in each country, for more than 2 o 3 classifieds sites (I’m afraid only one!). It’s for that reason I choose to concentrate my effort in my country and build a strong brand and presence in it. I think classifieds it’s a local business that you have to build city by city. You told you have 2 peoples for each country…. I have 25 peoples only for my little country and every one has a lot of work to do!! 13,5 Millions it’s a lot of money… I never see it in my life but for a 40 country fight…. I think it’s not enought. Schibsted will burn 5 to 10 millions for marketing in Italy to try to build his brand as we done…. or will use another strong italian paper-brand he have bought for 100M (as he has do in Spain as you well know) … How could you compete in a lot of country with so little money? In Italy for example…. how could you compete with our “Big 3″? Don’t you risk to waste money and focus ? Of course outside Italy I’m your first supporter !!! BRAVO FABRICE !!!

April 13th, 2008 at 9:48 am

And in Spain and numerous hispanic countries we use http://www.mundoanuncio.com

April 13th, 2008 at 6:26 pm

Congrats OLX team!
Now maybe you can go for http://www.clasificados.com domain and http://www.adoos.com traffic and lock the spanish market
Proud to be from Argentina and Palermo Valley.

April 14th, 2008 at 6:29 am

I have watched this company from when it was an empty site with a few posts. It’s an amazing accomplishment and very inspiring for other entrepreneurs. Go OLX!

April 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am

The thread may have been quiet for a while but… I enjoyed reading all the comments here. Congrats Fabrice and Co ( and, not to dwell to much on it, but great patience in the responses ). All the best in going strong ( maybe in future we’ll get to exchange ideas… see below ).
Every idea needs passionate believers and reality-check skeptics… the comments and questions provide some good food for thought. My personal view: just because CL is number 1 in the US doesn’t mean they have it right there ( or ‘big’ players in the rest of the world, for that matter ). So, if I may quote some of you:

“Time for Craigslist to change their UI ..”
“unless it is completely new, there is no chance for craigslist replicas!!!”
“But we really love our baby”

Hence: http://www.totalbazaar.com
‘Live’ Demo ( with fake data ): http://demo.totalbazaar.com

Simple idea:
- classifieds
- single entry point ( no multiple websites, at least not in the US )
- simple interface ( i know, CL et al already have something simple)
- kick-ass UI; no reason why all classifieds websites should have almost identical looks ( some of you will disagree, so I will remind you of quote #3: “… we really love our baby … ” )
- and why do you have to click when a pure text search should be at least as good if not better?
- and eventually Web 2.0 widgets ( eventually because we want to get the basics “right” first time before going crazy with features )

Still in it’s infancy, currently only in the US, but I’m not making any promises Fabrice - well, let’s first see if the seemingly popular and, in my opinion, defeatist view of “you cannot compete with CL” can be challenged - and then we might think of branching out.

I do not want to hijack this thread since it’s meant for OLX, so if you have comments about http://www.totalbazaar.com, send me mail at daudimc@hotmail.com. All the best to OLX.

easy.

April 23rd, 2008 at 1:34 pm

Previously I was using OLX, but now I started liking another new and upcoming site Infozeal.com (http://www.infozeal.com) which got tons of cool features to buy or sell almost any thing.

April 29th, 2008 at 8:55 pm

Well, I like OLX but have to say that that free is not always the anwer. For instance, the cities that craigslist charges for job posting are far superior to the free cities. Spammers do LOVE free. Serious people put a little money down. Check out http://barefootstudent.com to see a job board that people are willing to pay to post on.

May 8th, 2008 at 9:37 am

Fabrice, how do you do to launch ads from google? They are suppoused to be linked in the same window’s browser, replacing your site.
I didn’t want to use google ads in my blog just because don’t want the people to leave my site by clicking an ad… Is there a way to do this without braking Google’s conditions? I guess if you do it there must be a way. Would you share it please?
Thanks!

Johann