Ouedkniss.com How Teenagers Created the biggest website in Algeria

Algiers’ eighth most popular website began eight years ago when police came to close a suburban street market. For decades the market would frequently appear on a street known as Oued Kniss in the Algiers suburb of Kouba. There were people who would purchase trade, sell, or swap any item they could think of from TV sets to carpets. “It was really enjoyable,” remembers Mehdi Bouzid.

As with many teens in Algeria around 2006, Bouzid as well as his fellow friends, Hichem Soudah, Amine Benmouffok, Ahmed Bouaouina, and Djamel Eddine Dib, had a dream of beginning the first blog. They had had in mind the concept of a classified website for their peers and, as Oued Kniss’ souk closed and they were forced to rush their plans, get set up in an adjacent cybercafe, and make their own website. To pay homage to the souk, which they felt played a huge aspect of Algiers the city’s distinctiveness, they named it Ouedkniss.

At that time they weren’t thinking about making money, recalls Bouzid. “In 2006 there weren’t many Algerian websites. There were a handful of Skyblogs (a blog platform that was very popular in the early days among people who spoke French around the world), forums, and a handful of websites for information. The only thing we wanted to do was leave your mark across the web.”

From word-of-mouth to advertising on Ouedkniss.com

The first year the site received less than 20 users per day, with only a handful of classifieds shared by their acquaintances. But over time, the word became known. In 2007, the Team was invited to one of the very first e-marketing events in Algeria and Ouedkniss was the host. thousands of people in just one day. “This was an all-time record for us,” says Bouzid.

After completing their studies at university that the five friends saw the growth of their numbers; each of them could convert thousands of college students. At that time students were the perfect target because they were intrigued by the possibilities offered by the internet and wanted to test something new. Soon, the word began to spread beyond their institutions and the website began to become a hit.

“Many people have said that they began online due to Ouedkniss,”” says the cofounder. It was because of Ouedkniss, he says, that many people bought something at first or sought out an apartment or car for the first time.

Three years after developing and tweaking their product as well as the decision to let Algerians make Ouedkniss their own design, five friends decided to take it to the next level and began advertising the website in a way that appealed to both internet users and to those who were yet to join the site. In focusing on ads on the internet and Facebook to market the service, they differed from their Moroccan counterparts who invested heavily on TV and billboards to convince non-internet users to join. “You are able to find Algerians who don’t even possess an email account or use the internet but are on Facebook therefore we decided to focus on these people.”

In no rush to commercialize

Students who were more focused on creating something rather than becoming rich, the five buddies took their time before monetizing the site.

In 2009, they launched their Store service, a monthly subscription that offered professionals an online shop with a pre-defined number of classified advertisements. They encountered some resistance at the beginning, especially from the top users, who were not ready to pay for something they could get free. The team decided to lower the cost up to 1,000 Algerian dinars to buy 100 adverts, (10 DZD was $0.12 USD at the time). “It was so affordable, people couldn’t resist the offer,” he said.

The end of 2011 the company 100 sales representatives, but the beta was declared to be successful, so the team moved on and appointed an agent to contact brick-and-mortar store owners who own their own stores. Over the course of a year the number of Ouedkniss Stores increased six times.

The Stores were, however, not the only monetizing method that the team considered. In 2010 , they started advertising on their website. “It was a long timeto get there,” laments the cofounder. “I tried to handle advertising sales] myself between 2009 and 2010but quit,” he continues, explaining that advertisers didn’t get the significance of the internet. “They were antiquated, and believed that the internet was not serious enough.” Today, the startup has mostly delegated this task to a few advertising networks.

The situation is improving, he admits, thanks to the development of a newer advertising staff as well as the boom in the internet yet, marketers still don’t understand the web culture. He explains that the majority of advertisers are still hesitant to run CPM advertising (where the advertisers are paid for the number of views they receive) and prefer to pay per day. But, he says, despite those difficulties the site has been profitable ever since 2011.

A ten-year-vision

After eight years of perseverance and perseverance, Ouedkniss now boasts 250,000 daily visits, and is the first Algerian website in the country to achieve such numbers. While looking at neighboring countries – with international and major players integrating in Morocco and Tunisia being threatened by Schibsted’s TAYARA – could anyone have anticipated self-funded Ouedkniss remaining afloat for this long? “We’ve received offers, mostly emanating from the Middle East back in 2008,” says Bouzid, “but we’re not a fan of the idea of having investors but we do have our idea of what Ouedkniss could be in 10 years.”

The five friends have already begun to diversifytheir offerings, including their new Travel section, in which users can book online trips as well as the introduction of a dedicated website for cars called Autobip.