Slando

» see slando.ua as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

A classifieds site is only useful inside the distance you are willing to drive to collect a fridge. That makes it the most local product on the internet and the least exportable, which is why every country ended up with a different one on top and why almost none of those names ever travel. Slando was that name in Ukraine and for a while in Russia. Turkey had its own, still does, and I never had a single reason to open anyone else's.

The people behind it were not local at all. Michael Pennington and Simon Crookall had built Gumtree in London, sold it to eBay in 2005, and started the next one almost immediately, pointed at a market where the category was still open. The head office stayed in London with an office in Ukraine, and eBay came along as an investor, which meant Slando was in the odd position of being a rival to an eBay property while eBay held a piece of it.

It worked. By the time it changed hands the site was carrying around eight million live listings in Ukraine alone with nearly two million new ones a month, and something like eleven million users across the region. Property rentals and job ads and secondhand furniture and dating, all in one column, which is what a general classifieds site looks like when it wins a country. Naspers bought it in 2011 for twenty nine million dollars, a number that reads small now for a site of that size and read reasonable then.

Naspers did not want Slando specifically. It wanted every classifieds property in the world and it had been buying them in bulk, and the problem with that strategy is that you end up owning a dozen strong local brands with nothing in common. The Russian side went first, merged with Avito and OLX.ru into a single Avito in March 2013. Ukraine got the same treatment on 15 September 2014, when slando.ua started redirecting to olx.ua.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the people who built it ~

Pennington and Crookall are worth a line because they did the same thing twice on purpose. Gumtree began in 2000 as a noticeboard for the Australian and New Zealand crowd living in London, and grew into the default place a British person sold a sofa. Selling it to eBay in 2005 gave them the capital and the pattern, and Slando was the pattern applied to a much bigger and much emptier map.

The exit was smaller than Gumtree's and the product arguably better placed. What they had learned was that the hard part of classifieds is not the software, it is being the first site with enough listings that a seller assumes someone will read theirs. Every subsequent competitor has to beat that, and almost none do, which is why these sites get bought rather than beaten.

~ how the name went ~

This is a death by rebrand, which is a real death for anyone who typed the address. Ukrainian users did not lose the listings or the accounts or the categories. They lost a word they had been typing for years, replaced by three letters that meant nothing locally and had been chosen in an office on another continent, and the Ukrainian press covered it as exactly that kind of loss.

Naspers ran the same operation across most of what it owned that summer, so Tablica in Poland and Aprod in Hungary went the same way inside a few months of each other. There is an argument for it, and the argument is that a global brand is cheaper to advertise than eleven regional ones. What it costs is the thing a classifieds site actually runs on, which is the feeling that the site belongs to the place it serves.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »