After ST701 Classifieds, SPH has now launched Singapore’s very own search engine called Rednano in collaboration with Norwegian media group Schibsted ASA. Function-wise, it’s nothing to shout about - Google provides local searches too. But from a commercial aspect, I think it’s a wise move by SPH.

Rednano.com.sg consists of two main parts:
a) Business Directory - you have to purchase a listing.
b) Search Engine - websites are added by their crawler. You can also submit your site.

I’m not going to write about the end-user features because you can visit rednano.com.sg and try it out yourself. Personally, I didn’t find it any better than using google.com.sg - there are other bloggers who feel the same. I also don’t buy into Ben Koe’s interview with SPH Search’s CEO, likening Rednano to a national treasure trove of information.

My own believe is that it’s profit-driven more than anything. Looking at the Advertise With Us page, you’ll see that there are two advertising opportunities - one’s the paid directory listing I mentioned above and the other’s called adSMART, which looks very similar to Google’s Adwords.

For adSMART, you have adSMART Sponsor Ads that lets you advertise in the search results, and adSMART Content Ads that lets you advertise on SPH’s “future” publisher network - sounds familiar? No? Then check out the screenshots below:

So looking beyond the Rednano search engine, it looks to me like SPH is creating a local Google advertising platform. It makes sense because they already own most of the high-traffic websites in Singapore like Asiaone, Stomp, Hardwarezone and dailies like The Straits Times - why should they display Google Ads and lose a chunk on commission?

Using this as a starting point, SPH could start a publisher program like Google’s Adsense and start placing Rednano ads on the other local websites. Maybe it’s already in the pipeline as seen from their use of “future publisher network” above. If this happens, I think even blogger networks like Nuffnang and Advertlets will be in trouble because SPH will undoubtedly have more and bigger advertisers.

There’s a lot of money to be made. Just looking at the directory, if all 300,000 businesses buys the cheapest S$800 plan (see below; don’t ask where I got it from), Rednano stands to make S$240 million!

It’s still early days yet though. The AdSMART platform is still manual (you can’t manage your own campaign like Adwords) and the current “unlimited clicks” offer (instead of CPC) suggests that site traffic is likely insignificant at the moment. Either way, kudos to SPH for this bold idea (if my assumptions are right) and it doesn’t look impossible looking at how fast ST701 is growing.

Ming and Josh: time to put on your thinking caps? ;)