Mobiles to back Quikr's monetization

MUMBAI, INDIA: Quikr, a digital classified advertising company, is looking at mobile medium to increase its revenues flows. “It is nearly two and half years since Quikr was launched in August 2008, after its spin-off from eBay Inc. And now we have reached a point where we need to look at monetization of our business model,” says Pranay Chulet, Quikr India's CEO.

According to Chulet, advertising remains the main revenue source for Quikr, which is segmented into three categories — ads, premium listings and lead generation for small and mid-size businesses via SMS ads.

The premium listings and lead generation, despite having a small share in Quikr's income flow, generate high volumes due to low cost and wide categories for classifieds.

While, the Mumbai based company has already developed its mobile site to meet the growing demand of mobile based advertisements and content. “The mobiles will push up monetization for Quikr in near future as mobile reach in India has grown tremendously,”Chulet says.

He adds that the mobile ad traffic is already 2 -3 times higher than the existing online and the mobile site will facilitate ads in multiple formats. Chulet reckons that mobile Internet could leapfrog over the Internet across India. “The availability of low cost of mobile devices, mobile Internet services and the 3G, could drive high volumes of ads traffics and revenues,” he reasons.

Financially, Quikr is fairly strong as it had received three rounds of funding from Matrix Partners India, Omidyar Network, Norwest Venture Partners, along with eBay Inc., which holds a stake in the company.

With less than 100 people staff strength, the company has a strong in-house technology team which continuously develop and maintains the architecture of digital platform to support the growing demands. The technology team is already conducting tests of the mobile platform to make it robust to meet the future requirements.

In 2009, Quikr's traffic grew eight times and the number of people posting ads shot up by ten times compared to the previous year. And the growth trend is seen continuing in this year too as the same number of people have placed more ads, according to Chulet.

According to Chulet, Quikr's digital platform gets good and equal traction from people based in tier I as well as tier II cities. He says that the platform's reach will be increased over the existing 40 cities. “In small cities and towns, people don't have enough avenues for classifieds and the reach is small. So, for them, Quikr's digital platform is best option,” he adds.

“Education, entertainment and software programmers are the prominent areas of classifieds, which are highly visited or searched for information and ads, he points. With over 8 million unique visitors and more than a million listings posting every month, Chulet expects Quikr to become India's top digital platform for advertisements.