What about an Yahoo.ro ?
A man on the street who was smoking right into my nose reminded me (I hate this habit of smoking on the street, BTW) that I have just noticed the first big banner in Romanian on Yahoo today.
It led to an anti-smoking website.
I was already enjoying this and wanted to see through whom is being sold. Actually it seems to be an European initiative, at the E.U. level.
Come to think about it, it makes a lot of sense on the Romanian market. I’ve made some quick calculations and I think Yahoo has almost 80% of the e-mail users market (persons, normally), Gmail about 5%, Hotmail somewhere near 2.5% and all the Romanian providers altogether about 10-12%. The error margin maximum 5 percents of the obtained numbers.
That means that Yahoo is the biggest player on the Romanian market. Guaranteed and surely! This counts from the number of opened and utilized accounts, but also the number of page views / daily users (because everybody opens their email, but not everybody enters classified websites, job sites, dating and other services that demand a log in).
But we all knew that already, didn’t we? The question is: will they use their power to take some other market areas? For instance, a HotJobs on Romania would be a redoubtable competition for BestJobs and Ejobs. Especially since at the time being, because of the penury of good people, the two do not send enough good candidates on the accounts of the employers (I know from my own experience and after having talked with other people and from the statistics on the website – how many apply for the job). So most of the companies would say let’s try these ones too. The move would make sense from the financial point of view if it is to trust the numbers given by Calin in the ZF, for example.
When it comes about dating, it is a little curious. Meaning that the market is into a continuous rotation, it is pretty hard to make money from this taking into consideration the presence of more impressions than inventory in .ro and all those being on websites with better demographics. Plus the average Romanian teenager who, I do not think has more than 50 euros to spend (it would be interesting to know how much, btw). But if, for instance there is a Yahoo-MySpace partnership (somewhere in the future; I know, MySpace is at Google, but for me Yahoo-NewsCorp-(Microsoft) seems a much more normal alliance) it would be interesting that the capitalization starts from here. The impression is that the dating/social networking is much more regional than it seems. Especially with the extend of its use. I think a website for Bucharest only might gather more active users than a global one with Bucharest listed in the search engine profile. And the proof is that Noi2.ro and Sentimente.ro have more profiles than hi5 or the Yahoo dating (on the .ro side, normally).
For the news, interesting also. Would I be Yahoo and I’d feel to enter the .ro, I would make a partnership with a player from the second league of newspapers (regarding the online tops). Like Ziua or Romania Libera.
For adverts there are pretty good sectoral players (imobiliare.ro on real estate, autovit.ro on auto, okazii.ro on general subjects) but I do not think one of them compares to craiglist.org for instance (BTW – craiglist.ro is taken by Ziare Com Srl). My opinion is that yahoo.ro could play pretty nice on this side.
What is the main condition in my opinion? The aggregation of jobs, news, dating, announces in the e-mail interface. This is not very complicated, in fact. I can even give a few solutions (So, the Yahoo gentlemen, if you are reading this, buzz me :)) )
Can Google have the same strategy? Nope! It probably lacks the critical mass, plus the Gmail users are more advanced. The Yahoo Mail-ers lend themselves much more to a one-stop shop approach. MSN? I don’t think so. Or only with bigger-bigger-bigger-bigger expenses. Since for Yahoo the costs would be reasonable, in my opinion. It would be a sustainable business from the first year.
Enough for now, I stop to work a little too. 