What are the particular challenges and opportunities in the European market?

That's a pretty broad question... the European online classified market is not homogenous, it's a large collection of local and disparate markets. This won't change in the near future. Classified markets are local because they reflect our horizons and shopping habits (most of us spend 90% of our lives at home or at work). Technology changes faster than our daily lives and the challenge for anyone aiming to exploit local markets across Europe in the next 10 years is to balance economy of scale and centralisation on the one hand, with the flexibility on the other hand to accommodate local market factors. Compare any autos site in France with one in, say, rural Poland and you'll understand what I mean. I'm not talking about the technical differences -- at Rosetta we work with online classified publishers in different European countries every day, and technical issues are usually not a real problem. For a pan-European player, it's the practical, day-to-day detail of systems integration, cultural and legal differences, internet penetration, that make it hard to centralise and standardize. In this respect the classifieds business is no different from any other. There are of course terrific opportunities for market players who are able to rise to the challenge of combining local flexibility and speed of reaction with pan-European scale.

"Ask yourself this:
next time your average 18-year old
is buying a car, selling a guitar or renting a flat,
why wouldn't they start their search on the web?"

Guy Spriggs
Rosetta, Amsterdam

The background trend in this market is and will remain the shift in market share from offline classifieds (paper) to online (web, mobile, email, digital TV, etc). This shift is inevitable. It brings a speeding-up of the process that helps both buyers and sellers. For newspaper and magazine publishers this is a huge opportunity (unfortunately, they tend to see it as a threat). It's amazing how often major print publishers hesitate to embrace online business models, or simply stand back and watch new online competitors grab market share. It's obvious to me that classifieds printed on paper will become a minority market sector within 5 years. This is only logical, when you consider today's widespread internet usage and the relative slowness (and cost) of printing and distributing ads on paper pages. How can the printed page ever match the functionality of the PC for a generation that grew up with the internet? Ask yourself this: next time your average 18-year old is buying a car, selling a guitar or renting a flat, why wouldn't they start their search on the web?

Let's go back a step. I said that a major benefit of the shift from offline to online for consumers is that it speeds up the buying and selling process. It's faster to find stuff if it comes automatically into your email than to run to the store and read a local paper. Clearly, the need for speed won't stop there. The mobile classified market across Europe offers huge growth potential, precisely because it's even faster than your PC.

Classifieds are fantastic content for mobile platforms. Little bits of text plus phone number - you can even fit them into an SMS! In 5 years classifieds on your mobile phone and other mobile devices will be so commonplace that we'll wonder how we ever managed without them. When your phone is always connected to the internet, you soon realise the benefit of immediacy offered by  mobile services over a PC that sits on your desk at home or at work. When you're trying to rent a flat in a big city, speed is everything. We're already helping our forward-thinking customers like Loot.com in the UK develop these services today.

This interview was part of Rosetta's contribution to the EPS Focus Report: Classifieds Online -- it's available from the EPS website at www.epsltd.com 

See also this article for thought-provoking insights on the state of the market, April 2006: Internet Classifieds FAQ

Products & Services
Contact Us