This story about Algeria’s eighth most popular website began around eight years ago, when police arrived to shut down the street market of a suburb. For years, the market would periodically be found on a street called Oued Kniss in the Algiers suburb of Kouba. People would buy, sell, and swap whatever they could think of, from television sets to carpets. “It was great,” remembers Mehdi Bouzid.
As many teenagers in Algeria during the period of 2006. Bouzid together with four friends, Hichem Soudah, Amine Benmouffok, Ahmed Bouaouina, and Djamel Eddine Dib, had a dream of beginning a blog. They had already had in minds the idea of creating a classified site for their friends and, as Oued Kniss’ souk closed, they decided to hurry their plans, get set up in a nearby cybercafe, then develop their own website. In homage to the street market that they believed played an important element in Algiers its character, they named it Ouedkniss.
At that time, they weren’t even thinking about how to make money, says Bouzid. “In 2006 there weren’t many Algerian websites. There were only a handful of Skyblogs (a blogging platform popular at the time by francophones from all over the world) forum sites, as well as a handful of information websites. We wanted to leave their mark in the internet.”
From word-of-mouth to online advertising on Ouedkniss.com
In the beginning, the site had less than 20 people per day, along with a handful of classifieds shared by their acquaintances. However, gradually the word began to spread. In 2007 the team was invited to attend one of the first e-marketing events in Algeria, and Ouedkniss hosted thousands of people in just one day. “This was a record-setting event to us,”” notes Bouzid.
When they entered university, it was at this point that the group of five saw an increase in their numbers and could easily turn into thousands of college students. Students were at the time the ideal audience, since they were interested in the possibilities of the internet, and they were keen to experiment with something new. Quickly the word spread beyond their schools and the site was a success.
“Many users have told us they got started online due to Ouedkniss,” says the co-founder. It was through Ouedkniss it says that many purchased something from the web for the first time or sought out an apartment or car for the first time.
After three years of developing and tweaking their product and letting Algerians create Ouedkniss on their own design, five friends took the decision to go all-in and began advertising the website in a way that appealed to both internet users and to those who had yet become online. When they focused on ads on the internet and Facebook to promote the service they were different from their Moroccan counterparts who splurged in billboards and TV to get non-internet users to join. “You are able to find Algerians that don’t own an email nor use the internet, but use Facebook and Facebook, which is why we decided to focus on those.”
There is no hurry to monetize
As college students more interested in creating something rather than becoming rich, the five friends put off monetizing the site.
In 2009 they launched their Store offer which was a monthly subscription service that provided professionals with an online store with a pre-defined number of classified advertisements. The store was met with some resistance in the beginning with top users, who were not ready to pay for something they used to get free. The team decided to lower the price down to 1000 Algerian dinars to buy 100 ads, (10 DZD was $0.12 USD at the time). “It was so inexpensive, the people could not resist the offer,” he said.
The end of 2011 the company had 100 professional sellers However, the initial test was judged to be successful, therefore, the team resigned, and hired an account manager to connect with brick-and-mortar owners of their own shops. In the span of one year, it was reported that the total number of Ouedkniss Stores increased six times.
The Stores were obviously, not the only monetizing route the team explored. In 2010 , they started selling ads through the site. “It did take us a long timeto get there,” says the cofounder. “I tried to handle advertising sales] myself from 2009 to 2010but decided to give up,” he continues, explaining that advertisers weren’t aware of the significance of the internet. “They were old-fashioned, and they thought that the internet was not important enough.” Today, the startup has mostly outsourced this task to a handful of ad networks.
The situation is improving according to him, due to the emergence of a newer advertising staff and the internet’s boom, but advertisers still don’t comprehend the internet culture. He explains that the majority of advertisers are still hesitant to run CPM-based advertising (where companies pay in the number of views they receive) and prefer to pay per day. He says that despite all the challenges the site has been profitable ever since 2011.
A 10-year plan
In the span of eight years, perseverance and perseverance, Ouedkniss now boasts 250,000 daily visits, and it is also the only Algerian website that has surpassed such numbers. While looking at neighboring countries that have major and international players joining forces in Morocco and Tunisia being taken over by Schibsted’s Dayara could anyone have anticipated the self-funded Ouedkniss remaining independent for so long? “We’ve received offers, most of them emanating from the Middle East back in 2008,” says Bouzid, “but we’re not keen on the idea of having investors, we have our vision of what Ouedkniss could be in 10 years.”
The five members have already begun to diversify with their Travel section, where customers can now book trips online and also the launch of cars-dedicated website Autobip.
