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Cape Town - Mobile phones will play an increasingly significant role in online classifieds in SA, says a major player.
As more South Africans use smartphones as their primary method of connecting on the internet, online firms are paying attention.
"Mobile is a major part of our business future and it will influence the classified playing field in a big way. It's currently growing at a rate faster than that of web and should overtake web traffic this year," Felix Erken, managing director and co-owner of Junk Mail Publishing told Fin24.
The company made the decision to cease publishing the Cape Ads and the Durban edition of its classifieds paper on March 12.
Print publications in SA have taken a hit as circulation begins the long slow decline.
Print circulation decline
According to figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), newspaper circulation in the country declined by 3.7%, with just 29.9% of that representing actual sales, and 7% subscriptions.
Around 62% of circulation in SA lies with free newspaper publications, the ABC results show.
For magazines the situation is even more dire with an 8.6% drop in circulation and free publications making up around 62% of circulation.
But the online market for classifieds in SA is a crowded one. Gumtree owned by e-commerce giant eBay is the most popular website in the country and OLX is running an aggressive TV campaign for the online platform.
Social media channels such as Facebook are increasingly courting small businesses to the massive 1.3 billion strong global audience on the network.
The company says that there are 50 million active Facebook users in Sub-Saharan Africa and many businesses are converting to marketing on the social network because of the promise of sales.
"We have positioned ourselves against our competitors in a very simple way. We ensure that we continue to give our advertisers results online. This gives us a very strong position in a very competitive environment. It's important to note that our competitors have been here for ten years already," said Erken.
Digital spike
Junk Mail debuted online advertising in 1996 with a subscription model, but later abandoned that as competitors offered free access to classifieds advertising.
Erken hinted that the long slow decline of print would be matched by a drive in digital.
"While print was a great enabler for our online platform up to eight years ago, our digital platform continues to grow and remains self-sufficient and is now the biggest part of our classified business by far."
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