Nepal Ads: Publish Your Classified Ad in Nepal through One SMS

After completing his engineering in Noida and working in Infosys for 3years, James Singh decided to return back to his home in Nepal to start iCloud Technologies in 2010. “After a year, I was more inclined towards tech startups, developing products that are not in the market and helping society. Our first product was like google ad sense. We have now removed the product. Our latest new product, Nepal Adz is also in ad space. It is focused on solving the classifieds problem”, shares James Singh, Founder, iCloud Technologies, Nepal.

How does Nepal Ads intend to solve the classifieds problem in the Nepalese market? There is market for classified advertisements in Nepal but most people don’t have access to internet instead have mobile phones. “To post ads on websites, people don’t have a smart phone. I built a software that would accept advertisements as messages and will be displayed as classifieds on OnlineKhabar.com. To view the ads, people can visit onlinekabar.com which is really popular, 2^nd or 3^rd most popular website here in Nepal”, explains James.Onlinekhabar.com is the only publisher that Nepal Adz works with currently. iCloud is leveraging OnlineKhabar’s global rank and its 2 lakh daily page views to promote Nepal Adz. The advertiser can pick up any phone with SMS facility and type ICLD P1 <ad message> to 5006. Once the message is sent, the admin approves the ads and the ads are posted onto OnlineKhabar in about 15mins. Ads accepted comes on Facebook and Twitter as well. Apart from the cost of one SMS, customers need not spend anymore on getting their ads posted.

Due to their current focus of getting free ads, iCloud has not started any active marketing or sales initiative to spread the word around. Currently Nepal Adz receives 30 organically generated ads every day. They also have a premium model for advertisers. The premium customers get their ads posted on the top of the site for a price of Nepali Rupees 1000.

They have speed and cost as advantages over other players in the market although their service works only to complement other existing ad media. “When you want to sell your phone that is not more than 2 or 3k spending on placing an ad for it doesn’t make sense”, says James.

Although it seems cost effective to expand the model more on mobile for customers to also receive ads meeting their requirement, the cost of SMS is much higher in Nepal compared to India. It would cost Rs.2 for one SMS. Mobile application is also not currently part of their road map since the number of smart phone users in Nepal is much lesser than India.The good news is iCloud plans to go global with this ad service. They are looking to introduce a global mobile messaging code to send ad postings from anywhere in the world. They also intend to travel down to India and introduce their services in India. No service like JustDial currently exists in Nepal although Yellow pages, free ads newspapers exist there. Apart from expanding geographically to other countries, using the first mover advantage, iCloud could leverage this space by also becoming a JustDial in Nepal. Something for iCloud to think about.