Singapore Singapore

I just got informed by my good friend Larry Lim, an SEO consultant, that he’s been engaged by Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) to work on ST701. SPH is Singapore’s biggest media company and practically owns the local dailies, including the most popular website AsiaOne.

ST701 is SPH’s attempt to get on the online bandwagon in anticipation of falling print ad revenues. Considering the country’s tiny population and the many other competitors, it’s going to be an uphill climb to be number 1. There are already established players in the market like Mocca (Mediacorp), Phing and even eBay.

Basically, ST701 is a classifieds portal with the following four verticals:

1. Singapore Jobs – provides local job listings like JobsDB and Jobstreet.

2. Singapore Property – a lucrative niche (prices of private apartment has hit a record SGD4,500 per sq ft) with almost zero competition.

3. Singapore Cars – definitely a hit with car-crazy Singaporeans,.

4. Singapore Classifieds – the most competitve niche and which explains why even Yahoo Classifieds (Singapore) has closed shop recently.

Will ST701 succeed in an already crowded market? Clearly, it’s already achieved solid rankings on Google but I guess the main driver would be in its business model.

> Learn more about ST701.