OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.
Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe.
OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world.
As part of the agreement, hi5 will implement OLX features that include the ability to display ads on a user’s profile page and to see friends’ ads, as well as a feature to tell friends about their own ads via newsfeeds. OLX will also allow users to include videos and pictures in classified listings, comment, post/view listings in over 39 languages and 90 countries, and access the site from mobile devices. The latter two features are clearly meant to appeal to a large international user base.
Oodle, another major player in the online classifieds space, has been scoring similar deals recently with social networking services and portals like Facebook, MySpace and AOL.
Good luck. Would be fun to see marriage of social network and classified.
But how will OLX make money ?
We monetize through a combination of advertising and featured listings. Advertising works rather well on classified sites because people are on a search behavior. They are looking for something so their propensity to click on a relevant is high. Our average CTR is above 2%. Combined with the fact that we are in high CPC categories (real estate, jobs, merchandise sale, cars), our average eCPM is rather high.
Me parece una idea absurda por parte de OLX
Por que? Nos permite obtener mas usuarios en los paises donde Hi5 es grande…
Umm…my social network is about the same size, in terms of monthly uniques in the US.
So…if I burp & partner with a no name company, will I get some coverage for our business, too?
Hi5…what? It’s like saying “the dominant social network in Maldives…” 99.9% of the time, people will say “where is that?”. (It’s an island country, where I”m living as of about a week ago).
Hi5 does almost 20 billion page views per month…
That’s billion… According to Alexa they are the 37th largest site in the world.
Wish we would have known they were shopping for a classifieds site, we could have easily implemented http://www.jicka.com into hi-5! Oh well hopefully next time
wow! all these new classified ads websites poppin’ outta no where. A coworker even showed me a site I suggest you folks to take a look at. http://www.clasilistados.org
Sounds familiar, huh?!
jicka: not my style, definitely! : ( sorry, thumbs down
I’m better off with Craig
S
Does anyone think they’ll eventually be taken over by Facebook? I mean Facebook is already pretty prevalent throughout the world.
Hi5 used to do a lot more than 20 billion pages views a month and 3 months ago they were the 25th largest site in the world according to Alexa, They have also gone through 2 rounds of layoffs recently. Like myspace and other networks, they are basically toast now that facebook has gone multi-language. Just run the comparison chart at “Max” on alexa and the picture does not look rosy.
Of course not that this affects OLX so much, just that the deal is likely to be a short-term one as hi5 probably won’t be around in a couple of years…
hi5 is doomed to fail. they are loosing ground to facebook at an increasingly higher rate, even in their “strongholder” markets such as LatinAmerica.
Give me a high five, olx.
More than a year ago we released a full ads plataform…Completelly. Thanks to Google App Engine, we began creating a classifieds portal in http://bazar.appspot.com. Then, with the popularty of social networks, we selected facebook for give to our ads a viral character too. So then born http://apps.fac...com/bazargratis and late we join twitter. We have two goals.
1. Easy to use.
2. Maxime broadcasting for ads.
Test it.
how I fix my profile, can you help me… hwo is the person I have to call…. I don”t know
The idea isn’t very new, but I found this site Listota — they have a nice setup of free anuncios. You can see the website at http://www.listota.com
Some of the other sites are useful too but i just like the interface of this one more.