AyosDito.ph

» see ayosdito.ph as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This one did not close. It was pointed somewhere else. On 22 January 2015 anybody typing ayosdito.ph arrived at olx.ph instead. There was no last page and nothing anywhere that used the word closed. A redirect is the quietest way to end a website and it is the way most acquired websites now end.

AyosDito launched in March 2009. The name is Tagalog for "ok here", which is about as good as marketplace naming gets, and the business was ordinary online classifieds: phones, cars, property, jobs, whatever a person has and wants gone. It was owned through 701Search, a Singapore joint venture between Singapore Press Holdings and Schibsted, the Norwegian media group that spent the 2000s buying classifieds businesses across Asia and Europe. By 2013 AyosDito was the second largest site of its kind in the Philippines.

Second place was the problem. OLX had already taken the first: in March 2014 the local leader Sulit.com.ph merged into OLX and started operating under the OLX Philippines name. That left AyosDito running against a competitor with the country's biggest classifieds brand behind it, and on 13 November 2014 the merger was announced. It was a small piece of a much larger settlement between Naspers and 701Search that carved up territory across Asia and Latin America. The Philippine market went from three big classifieds sites to one inside eleven months.

Nothing like this reached Turkey, because the Turkish equivalent never sold. Classifieds here consolidated the same way they did everywhere else, except the winner was sahibinden.com, which started in 2000, stayed Turkish and is still trading under its own name. The global roll-up that swallowed the Philippines and most of Latin America simply stopped at this border. That is not a story about better product. It is a story about who was willing to sell.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the ads did not come with you ~

The migration was the ugly part. Listings did not transfer. Users got an email containing their own active ads and had to choose which ones to repost on OLX, one at a time, in the window between 16 January and the redirect on the 22nd. Existing OLX accounts were untouched, which made the direction of the merger clear enough without anybody saying it.

For a casual seller that is a trivial inconvenience. For anybody who had built up years of listing history and seller reputation on AyosDito, it was a reset, and reputation is most of what a classifieds site actually sells you. When two marketplaces merge, the one whose users have to re-enter their own data is not the one that survived.

~ where the name points now ~

The redirect held for years, which is the polite version of this ending. Naspers kept the domain pointed at OLX so that old links and old bookmarks landed somewhere useful, and for a while that was a reasonable memorial.

It does not do that anymore. Today ayosdito.ph forwards to an unrelated Indonesian page with nothing to do with classifieds or with the Philippines, which means the domain has been through at least one more pair of hands since. Six years of a country's buying and selling ran through that name, and the name is now scrap. That is the second death, and unlike the first one nobody announced it either.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »