Dubai, UAE — The website Dubizzle, a free online classified-advertising service popular with expatriates, has had its busiest month of traffic, its managers say.
They said the site, launched in 2005, recorded more than 1 million visits this month for the first time in its history. Traffic to the site has more than doubled since late last year.
“We’ve been seeing steady growth at the site for a long time now but things just really shot up at the beginning of the year,” said JC Butler, the site’s co-founder. “It seemed like when people got back from the Christmas and New Year break, everything took off.”
Dubizzle is commonly used by those moving house or leaving the country to sell their cars and household items. Recent economic forecasts have predicted a significant population decline in Dubai this year, as high-employment sectors such as construction and property shed tens of thousands of jobs.
Mr Butler said many aspects of the economic climate were behind increased interest in the site. He said while many people were leaving the country, others were moving homes to take advantage of a more flexible housing market, and some were moving between cities.
Budget-conscious consumers are also showing more interest in buying second-hand goods.
“These days, people are interested in saving every penny,” Mr Butler said.
Advertising spending by developers and estate agents was dropping, but individual property owners who had hoped to quickly sell their units for profit were now opting to advertise them for rent, he said. This had led to a growing demand for ads in the site’s real-estate section.
While demand for Dubizzle’s free service is booming, paid classified advertising, once a cornerstone of print newspaper businesses, is not.
Sameer Dhawan, the sales manager in charge of classifieds at Gulf News, said he had seen little recent movement in ad sales. “But of course, compared to last year, everything has gone down,” Mr Dhawan said.
The value of classified ads at the Khaleej Times is down 21 per cent compared with the same time last year, according to Mohie Patel, the vice president of advertising at the newspaper.
By Tom Gara and Keach Hagey
March 30, 2009
source: thenational.ae