Molotok.ru

» see molotok.ru as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Every country with a connection got one of these between 1998 and 2001, and the local one was almost never eBay. Turkey had GittiGidiyor and Britain had QXL. Russia had Molotok, which is the word for hammer, meaning the auctioneer's rather than the toolbox's, and it opened on 15 December 1999 with a logo drawn by Artemy Lebedev's studio.

The first user account was registered on 21 October, before the site formally launched. The first item sold went for eight hundred rubles and was a pager, which is about as precise a date stamp as any object could be. Eighty thousand people had accounts by the end of 2000, in a country where a household connection was still an unusual thing to have.

Ownership moved early and kept moving. netBridge, Yuri Milner's company, took it over in 2000, and netBridge went on to become part of Mail.ru. QXL Ricardo bought a quarter of it in 2007, and QXL was itself swallowed by the South African group Naspers. On 27 August 2009 the Polish Allegro Group, another Naspers property, took control and rebuilt the Russian site in the image of Allegro.pl.

I cannot read the listings and never could, and that is most of my distance from this one. An auction site is not a service you use at arm's length like a search engine. It is fifteen million short descriptions written by strangers in a script I do not have, and half the value is in reading the seller's phrasing carefully enough to decide whether to bid. Cyrillic closes that door completely, and no amount of interest opens it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ fifteen million lots ~

The 2009 figures are the ones worth keeping: about fifteen million items listed simultaneously and a quarter of a million unique visitors a day. Turnover reached 2.7 billion rubles in 2011, which the Russian press put at 1.1 percent of the country's entire e-commerce market. For a site with no warehouse and no stock of its own that is a real number.

What sat on it was the usual auction inventory of a country going through a transition, which meant Soviet-era watches and cameras alongside new electronics. Collectors outside Russia knew the site for exactly that, and forum threads in English about Soviet watch collecting still reference it as the place those items came from. Molotok was a supply line into a category that no other site could stock.

~ owned by the company that owned the competition ~

The ending is a portfolio decision rather than a failure of the product. Naspers, through Allegro, controlled Molotok. Naspers also held a stake in Avito, the Russian classifieds site, which by 2015 was drawing more than 3.8 million daily visitors against Molotok's 250,000. One shareholder, two horses, and one of them fifteen times faster.

The financials underneath made the choice easy. Molotok's last full year produced about three million dollars of revenue and three hundred thousand of operating income, which is not a loss but is not worth the management attention either. The Russian coverage was blunter than the English: the acquisition, the rebranding and the years of upkeep had never been earned back.

~ six weeks notice ~

The announcement went out on 9 July 2015 and named the date, which is more courtesy than most closures manage. Sellers had six weeks to finish open auctions and get in touch with buyers they would otherwise lose, and the forums filled with people trying to move their trade somewhere else before the deadline.

On 20 August 2015 the site closed and the company behind it wound up. The Russian auction market did not consolidate afterward so much as evaporate into classifieds, where nothing is bid on and everything is negotiated by message. Avito won that argument for the whole country, and the auction as a shape of transaction quietly stopped being how anything is sold there.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »