Unknown to many, SPH has quietly transformed ST701.com from a recruitment site into a full-blown classifieds portal, becoming the newest entrant to Singapore’s crowded online classifieds space. What’s nice about ST701.com is their focus on the site rather than on marketing - no half-naked man or scantily-clad women ads, but a portal that works! Will ST701.com succeed where Mocca.com had failed? Probably. Firstly, I disagree with Ben’s views of having a “community” component in a classifieds portal. Otherwise, why is a site like Craig’s List, which is purely made up of ad listings, so successful? Based on my own experience with websites, different types of websites will attract a different type of crowd. For classifieds, people either come in and list their item for sale, or find what they want, buy and leave - they are not going to hang around and chat. Hence, a good classifieds site should focus on it’s features, usability and of course, pricing - you don’t need a fancy domain name or sleazy ads. ST701.com seems to have done really well here by creating a clean, organized and fast-loading website that’s easy to use. In addition to having the same built-in features like Mocca.com (videos, etc.), they have something called Just Ask, which allows users to ask questions like Yahoo! Answers. The other interesting thing is that they’ve cleverly divided the portal into 4 verticals: This allows them to push relevant information and which should provide some “stickiness” to their fickle crowd, e.g. home fengshui articles, car reviews, COE prices, loan interest rates, etc. Best of all, there is a permanent free option for posting ads, although I hope that they remove the ad duration limit. Paying S$5 gets your ad listing highlighted and rotated in the “Top Picks” area, and $8 gives you the extra presence in the “Featured Products/Services” area. Although ST701.com is still in beta, they seem to have matched Mocca.com’s reach according to Alexa - no mean feat considering Mocca.com’s huge marketing campaign on MRTs, taxis, billboards, TV and radio. It’s no surprise that media companies in the region are scrambling to get online in anticipation of falling revenues from traditional advertising. Online ad spend has already surpassed both print and radio in the U.K., and is closing in on television. Will ST701.com beat the likes of Mocca.com, eBay.com.sg, Yahoo Classifieds, Phing, Hardwarezone and many others in this competitive niche? Only time will tell.
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Hi Larry,
I don’t know if you’ve checked out homespace.sg yet, but I’d love to hear your views on how it compares to ST701 and Mocca. :)
Comment by Vin on October 31, 2007 at 4:26 pm
Neither works. Both online and traditional advertising has its limitations.
We need one that synergises both. And this is it: –link removed–
Comment by Optimus Prime on October 31, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Vin: I actually visited your site a while back after reading about it on sgentrepreneur.com but it wasn’t launched yet. I’ll take a look again.
Optimus Prime: your link has been removed for the obvious spam.
Comment by Larry on October 31, 2007 at 4:46 pm
I saw that ST701 has started an aggressive online ad campaign as well.
Vin: Homespace is certainly a refreshing site. Congrats for daring to be different!!! Hope you get enough activity to get it rolling.
Comment by Dinu on October 31, 2007 at 6:15 pm
Hi Larry,
Thanks for popping by with your comments. Nice to have some expert comment here on my braggings and ramblings, clearly I’m not a SEO guy here.
Actually in China I bought you salted fish in one city but I ate it in the next city where I bought you deep fried scorpions instead but they were so yummy I ate them all up en-route to the next city. Finally, I brought you some nice “Calviin Klein” toiletries but they confiscated them @ the customs coz they thought I was gonna blow up the plane with it?!?
Sure, let’s catch up!
HighwayBlogger
Comment by HighwayBlogger on November 2, 2007 at 6:03 am