Classified ads as market niche
Online classifieds are very present and representative in US, UK and Australia. It is high competitive market due to two reasons: first one is spoken English language and the second one is high computer literacy. This is competitive advantage to online companies such as Craigslist and eBay in terms of expanding to countries and regions where English is the official language.
In Europe, online classifieds are more present in Western countries because of high computer literacy as well. Online classifieds in Eastern Europe started to develop recently and are s following the trend of increase of computer literacy among population.
In Croatia, digital media is present at the market, but still there is very low awareness. Companies do not know have clear marketing strategies how to develop smooth transition from traditional media to digital media. There are different barriers that need to be considered: citizen’s low computer literacy and language barrier.
There are several interesting properties that make classified ads well-suited by Jakob Nielsen in his column on “advertising on Web”:
they are a classic “pull” medium: customers seek out the classifieds when they decide to look for a used car or when they want to hire a house-keeper.
they are well-suited for computerized searching and sorting: you may want to look only for used BMW cars that cost less than $5,000 or are less than 3 years old, or you may only be interested in a red Z3
they are time-sensitive, but not on a day-to-next-day basis: you want to see all open offers, no matter whether they were posted today or yesterday, or even earlier. As soon as the advertised offering has been sold, the ad should be pulled and not shown to any more customers (a static listing wastes both parties’ time)
sellers can type their own entries directly into the ad database since they know what they are selling. Using the hypertext feature of the Web, ads can link to as much background information as necessary; cryptic but space-saving abbreviations go away (harddisks are cheaper than newsprint)
multimedia features can save both buyers and sellers time by allowing potential buyers to learn more about the offering before contacting the seller (just how cute is the puppy? - well, see the photo, or even the movie)