One of the ways OLX has grown has been by partnering with other sites to run their classifieds channel. This strategy has proven successful because OLX is rather good at monetizing traffic. When you look at the distribution of Google revenues, a small percentage of searches account for the bulk of the revenues. The car, jobs, real estate and general merchandise searches are particularly successful. Given that those are some of the categories that OLX focuses on, the site generates much higher average eCPMs than the average site, especially internationally.

This provides an opportunity for a win-win partnership with partners: we monetize their traffic well, offer their users a great service, take away all the hassles of customer service, scam/spam control and localization while giving them the bulk of the revenues generated.

Our first large partnership was with Friendster (http://olx.friendster.com) and we now run the classifieds channel for Fotolog (http://fotolog.olx.com). Fotolog is huge with over 3.5 billion page views per month, its geographic footprint nicely aligns with that of OLX and its communal spirit also aligns with the free, local and community oriented focus of OLX.