Hi All,
Would request the expert in online classified/ online search engine experts to guide me on the below mentioned query:-
Justdial is the market leader in B2C segment and has a database of around 12 million business establishments in India. However as per my research they there are over 100 million business establishments in India and hardly 10% is captured by the existing players. Further they mainly have presence in tier1 and 2 cities and focus mainly on service oriented field. Even though Justdial has a database of 12 million however the paid listing are close to 2 lakhs . So are they doing justice to the market as they are focusing only on 1% of the total market.
Indiamart and tradeindia are market leaders in B2B segment and have a database of close to 3-4 million business establishments. They have a different business model as compared to Justdial though they too work on paid listing formula. Even these 2 leading players are not covering the entire SME of india .
Normally experts say that these segment is matured and dominated by market leaders and there is no scope for start-up in this space. However when we see the ground reality SME and Business establishment in India is still are still not properly represented in the online space.
I basically have 2 query from the experts:-
1. Are the existing players doing justice to the market as they are presently covering only a portion of the actual market.
2. If a start up somehow arranges database which is not available with the existing platform and target to bring them into online space than what kind of opportunity we are looking into?
Yatin Mulay
1. Wrong question IMHO. Why are you worried whether existing player are doing justice to the market or not? What matters is that they’re still solving a real problem for a large number of target audience & creating value. I’m sure the existing players are trying to find ways to tap into the untapped market segment too.
2. It’s not about the size of your database only. It’s about the real biz transactions you can generate on the platform which is a function of targeted traffic.
We built a database of 5 million + records by scraping a particular category from more than 40 mainstream classifieds sites like craigslist, kijiji, etc. We failed miserably when traffic plummeted after Google Panda decimated the site. No traffic = No transactions = No listing revenue