If dubizzle were a crowdfunding platform, we’d all be part owners in 1,000 Burj Khalifas.
Thankfully, it’s only a peer-to-peer classifieds platform. The site is now ten years old, and in that time it has facilitated millions of posts, with a total value estimated at just under Dh5 trillion, according to a company statement. The iconic tower cost just over Dh5 billion to build.
Beyond those numbers, dubizzle has had some successes. It records over 270 million page views per month, and has grown from 200 ads placed in 2005, to 16.6 million ads in 2015, according to the statement.
“To look at it another way, in 2015 Dubai Mall had around 75 million visitors, dubizzle had 65 million visitors! Anything you can buy in Dubai Mall you can find on dubizzle… in addition to this you can also sell your house, buy a car and find a new job!”, says Barry Judge, General Manager of dubizzle.
According to alexa.com, the site was the sixth most visited in the UAE in 2015, and has over 2.1 million unique visitors a month, with an average of two visits per week per visitor, with the average visit lasting 16.5 minutes.
Over the period, it also claims to have redefined the culture of ownership in the UAE by strengthening the country’s second-hand economy, and using technology to bridge a market gap. It also improved transparency. For example, the dubizzle property estimate gives users an honest representation of the average property value by area, size, number of rooms etc. by calculating and comparing against average costs in the market, empowering users so they can make a more informed and smarter purchase decisions.
“Since our launch ten years ago, we’ve seen a change in user behaviour, witnessed the e-commerce desktop industry shift to m-commerce mobile purchasing and we’ve evolved our offering accordingly,” Judge says. The platform launched an app in 2014.
Last year it made its first external investment into fashion marketplace app Shedd, which was conceptualised by two former dubizzle employees. The m-commerce app provides a platform for fashion lovers to sell second-hand items. Perhaps in a few years’ time they’ll have sold enough handbags to carry all the 330,000 cubic metres of concrete it took to build the Burj Khalifa.
