Already last year there was a lot of talk in Finnish media circles about how Schibsted, who own, for example, Aftonbladet and Svenska Dagbladet, is coming and taking a big share of Finnish media’s most profitable products: classifieds and market places. Now the land grab has started and its called Tori.
Tori has set up the shop quickly and started strong. It’s modeled on the Swedish service Blocket. Monthly uniques for the month of January broke 300,000. That is an impressive number given the service had zero publicity and was only gearing up for the launch. The team, headed by the CEO Jussi Lystimäki, drove traffic to the site using Adwords and smart guerilla advertising tactics.
It looks like Schibsted is killing it and Sanoma and Alma Media are just waiting to get slaughtered. This is partly because of the efficient formula that Schibsted uses in every country it enters, partly Schibsted’s flawless execution, and partly due to the complete lack of effort in developing the current Finnish services further. Huuto.net hasn’t seen any development efforts to improve the site regardless of the horrid user experience that everybody is well aware of. Another big difference to Huuto.net is that you don’t need to register with Tori.fi and you’re not pulled into an auction, which further improves the ease of use.
The Norwegian media powerhouse has already played the same trick in Sweden, France and in Spain, and by doing so has become the #1 destination for products and services people love to swap. Altogether the Blocket-platform is in use in eight different countries.
So what’s next for Schibsted in Finland? Most likely it will be to create a Finnish Hitta.se. So whoever owns Etsi.fi can plan on cashing in pretty soon. It will be interesting to see how far the media company can go with its formulaic approach. Will the old continent’s old media hold the fort against these Vikings? Schibsted has clearly done something right and won big markets, but it has also taken hits, which can clearly be seen from its battered balance sheet that has suffered from the massive amount of traffic it has bought in from the markets the company has entered.
In France it took Schibsted three years to get the top spot in classifieds and market places with Leboincoin that uses the exact same platform as Tori. Let’s see long Finland will last?
Biovakka Suomi Oy 
Bitbar
A quick peek at Schibsted’s sites reveals that they are not up-to-date with SEO, which is at the core of long term winning strategy for classifieds sites.
Blocket and Tori are focusing more B2C which is really hard to commercialize. Alma and Sanomat are mostly playing on B2B whic is having clear business modell with “paying” customers.
This is an interesting comment, given that Blocket is apparently posting a 50-70% EBITDA and the Norwegian equivalent Finn.no a 30-50% EBITDA (source: Schibsted’s 09 Q3 report).
I would be very interested in knowing Alma’s profit margins in these easier-to-commercialise “paying customer” domains ;-)
First of all, there are C2C, B2C and B2B models in classifieds. I take it that by B2B you mean the sales model, not B2B classifieds that is a totally different thing.
Tori primarily operates in C2C classifieds field, like Mikko.fi, Huuto.net and KeltainenPorssi.fi. Granted, there are B2C elements as well, but the real deal is C2C marketplace with monetization models usually being traditional upsell, since there has not been any sales commissions (that eBay makes a ton of money from). Then you have B2C listings in C2C services, but the volumes have not been stellar thus far.
To get a proper picture of the playing field w/ B2B sales model, you should look at Finn.no performance and compare that to Finnish equivalents. Alma for example makes zero profit in marketplaces according to their latest financial report (Q3/09). I would not call that easy monetization.
I seriously don’t understand Sanoma’s attitude towards updates to Huuto.net. I mean, even if they consider the current business model and layout to be near perfect, they could at least get one of their developers to spend like half a day with the project and update the search, if nothing else :-)
For a site where searching is The core functionality, it is bit absurd that you can’t do stuff that should be considered trivial (say, search for “ac dc”, within “tickets” category, for a seller that has more than 5 feedbacks in his history, for items that are about to close within 48hrs and where there’s no minimum price set by the seller… cant be done..).
But hey, maybe the AlmaSanoma duopoly will begin to crack. Should give more room for indie publishers (with unique ideas) as well :-)
Trader Classified Media sold Schibsted its assets across Southern Europe (and some smaller units in Latin America) for $742 million in 2006. In effect, this is how Schibsted took leadership of the Spanish market, by purchasing the incumbent online classified players (including generalist website segundamano.es, real estate portal fotocasa.es, car portal coches.net, and a share of jobs portal infojobs.net).
I am not familiar with the Northern markets, but I do think that the challenge in such a concentraded and small market as Finland does not play nicely for Schibsted, as it will be very costly in terms of content and traffic acquisition to crack the current incumbents, regardless of their existing flaws and/or product quality in terms of functionality (as stated by above).
NB. If superior functionality was everything to make good classifieds, why is craigslist a cult-site?)