Zoltan’s Business News & Blog

I just found this post on Fabrice Grinda’s blog. I usually don’t like to comment on my blog about other blogs, but I found this post extremely funny and in the same time very sad….

I hope he doesn’t mind if I republish it in my blog:

“If you had purchased $1,000 of Delta Air Lines stock one year ago, you would have $49 left.
With Fannie Mae, you would have $2.50 left of the original $1,000.
With AIG, you would have less than $15 left.

But, if you had purchased $1,000 worth of beer one year ago, drunk all of the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling REFUND, you would have $214 cash.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle.”

TradeHolding.com B2B Network is in Alexa Top 100k since 2004, in fact we have many sites on TradeHolding.com B2B Network with a Top 50k Alexa ranking, or even Top 20k Alexa ranking.

Last month, in August 2008, 2 more websites we launched recently reached the Top 100k Alexa ranking:

• OneLoveNet.com Free Dating Site and
• Kugli.com Local Classified Ads website.

Also, Mondinion.com International Property Listings Portal, covering a more specific niche reached 300-500 uniques every day and more and more real estate for sale and real estate for rent listings are posted day after day.

Overall, this summer was very good in terms of traffic for all our websites, our Quantcast measured websites are close to 1 million uniques / month, a traffic that place our network to a ranking of 6658 among all Internet destinations: “Premier World Sites is a top 10,000 destination that reaches over 976K monthly people, of which 226K (23%) are in the U.S.”

I just launched our newest project: Mondinion.com real estate listings portal. Why this name Mondinion? Because:

1. I could not find any available domain name containing the terms “realestate” or “property”.

2. Instead of someverylongrealestateorpropertydomainname.com I preferred to use a name that we think is more brandable like Mondinion.com. I also registered Ragla.com at the same time, but finally decided that Mondinion.com is a better name for a real estate portal.

What is Mondinion.com? Based on our first page definition: “If you are looking for properties, real estate or other housing related ads and propery listings you came to the right place. is a real estate platform, an international real estate for sale or real estate for rent listings directory. Our free real estate for sale or rent directory and classifieds service can help you to sell your house, apartment, land, villa, castle or property and to find cheap US and International properties for sale.” Frankly, I can not explain it better. It will be basically a place where developers, owners and real estate agents will post their housing related listings while investors and home buyers will search and browse among the listings and if offer and demand is matched a deal will be closed. Simple as 1+1.

I tried to build an easy to browse & nice looking website… well, it is not nice looking yet… I am very bad in design, but I already work with a designer to make it more professional.

Mondinion.com Property Listings Website is affiliated with our other Classified Ads Website Kugli.com and whatever real estate ad you post on Kugli.com will also show up on Mondinion.com and vice versa.

Some quick stats for April:

• TradeHolding.com B2B Network had its best month so far in its 5.5 year of existence, in terms of membership revenue, number of visits was also high
• OneLoveNet.com free dating service generated the biggest growth: number of new accounts, number of visitors, number of logins, revenue were all on top
• Launched Kugli.com Free Classifieds Site, growing very fast in terms of visitors, just check our Alexa ranking…
• Working hard to launch the Global Real Estate Listings Portal Mondinion.com, I prefer not to estimate the launch date, I don’t like to “guesstimate”…
• The number of servers we manage currently has grown to 7 in April… quite a lot, but I prefer to have fast loading pages.

On the other hand, the biggest challenge on all these UGC (user generated content) sites is fighting with scam and spam. It is fortunate that we already have embedded techniques and manual verification to fight scam and spam, however, as I wrote on earlier posts nothing can be perfect.

Yes, we are online but still in beta… Kugli.com, the free global and local classifieds website opened last week and we are now officially accepting classified ads for local communities.

There are already plenty of classified ads posted by visitors, what I like a lot is the extremely easy ad posting form, thanks to Ajax. There is no need for users to register, they can simply use a form to publish their ads. The biggest challenge so far is convincing users to post their ads, until the site looks empty very few persons will actually spend time to post an ad. But I am confident that in a few months my biggest challenge will be spam and scam fighting… although I already embedded some techniques to detect and eliminitate scam and spam, however nothing can be perfect.

What other features am I going to integrate? Just to mention the 2 most important things:

• member registration, login and ad tracking
• multilingual support.

Also, I have some other plans for marketing, but I will write about this sometime later.

Do you like Kugli.com? We welcome your links from your website and any suggestion.

Yes, I am close to launch www.kugli.com - Free Classified Ads website. I am still working on the scripting part but hopefully it will not take more than a few days to launch it. This is the first project where I use a lot of Ajax.

For the beginning Kugli.com will have 6 main categories:

• Real Estate Ads
• Cars & Vehicles
• Sell & Buy
• Services
• Pets & Animals
• Jobs & Resumes

I am eager to start it and compete with the big guys… So, kijiji and craigslist, be prepared, I am going to compete with you soon.

A new big internet sale:

“In an unexpected move, AOL has acquired social-networking site Bebo. The price tag: $850 million in cash…. AOL has made it clear that buying Bebo is a move geared toward international growth, as the youth-oriented social network is wildly popular in the U.K., Ireland, and New Zealand. AOL reported that it has launched “17 international web sites over the last year and has plans to expand to 30 countries outside the U.S. by the end of 2008,” as well as international versions of its home page and some services. Bebo, meanwhile, plans to launch five localized versions of its service this year (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands), and AOL will make it a major part of the company’s international expansion strategy.”

Bebo is the 3rd largest social network in the US. and the number 1 in the UK.

The entire article about this deal on news.com.

Yes, just take a look at the top movies section at OneLoveNet.com Free Online Dating Site. What do we see? Titanic, Romance, Friends, Romantic, 4 clearly “romantic” tags from the Top 10 used sd preferred movies by Singles. It looks like we all need love and romatism…

Other popular movies preferred by singles: Action, Comedy, Prison Break, Lord of the Rings, Gladiator, Matrix. I do not have such statistics but I guess that Gladiator and Matrix are most probably preferred by the machos.

See the Full List of Top Movies here.

Based on the number of users on OneLoveNet.com, here is a list of the Top 25 most active dating cities:

Free Dating Dubai
Free Dating Bucuresti
Free Dating Mumbai
Free Dating Delhi
Free Dating Nairobi
Free Dating Chennai
Free Dating Kolkata
Free Dating Bangalore
Free Dating Karachi
Free Dating Hyderabad
Free Dating Lahore
Free Dating Pune
Free Dating New Delhi
Free Dating Abu Dhabi
Free Dating London
Free Dating Toronto
Free Dating Cairo
Free Dating Dhaka
Free Dating Islamabad
Free Dating Kampala
Free Dating Iasi
Free Dating Constanta
Free Dating New York
Free Dating Bucharest
Free Dating Coimbatore

So, what do we see here? The top is Dubai from UAE. The second position is occupied by Bucharest, the capital of my country. Considering the fact that when I launched OneLoveNet.com I promoted it aggressively in Romania, this might not be that relevant. Then on the top 10 there are many cities from India and Pakistan, countries with big populations. The best “western” cities are London from the UK and Toronto from Canada, positions 15 and 16. Then, on the Top 25 we also see cities from African countries like Kenya or Egypt and another big city from UAE, Abu Dhabi. The best US city is of course… New York. Good luck on finding your One Love on the Net!

Yes, it looks like we beat ourselves every month with TradeHolding.com B2B Network. In January, we announced a record number of visitors: 60,489 visitors in just one day. Well, February has been even better. We had 88,952 visitors in just one day: February 26. The next target is 100,000 visitors in just one day. Obviously the number of messages exchanged between our members is increasing as well and the number of new companies that join our network every day. And yes… our revenues are also growing month after month. Considering that I run this network mostly alone (with the help of a few devoted site-partners… and some technical and customer care help…), I think I can not complain… Some of my competition claim that they invested $20 million in a similar site… well I have to say that my investment was in a much much smaller scale… Not to mention the biggest player in the B2B Marketplace Alibaba.com, which was partly sold to Yahoo (I guess 40%) for $1 billion…

Our free dating site, OneLoveNet.com is also growing and things are looking very good here as well. Most of the free dating sites do not have limitations, and it looks like our kind of hybrid model is working very well and although spamming and scamming is still present on our sites, it is on a much smaller scale than on other free dating sites. Thanks to the community as well, our team of moderators are doing a great job. Want to join us? Just read more here.

Regarding our future plans, we will soon launch Mondinion.com, a Free Real Estate Property Ads & Listings website. The goal is to make this website the number 1 destination for international real estate and property classifieds where property owners (and real estate agents as well…) will be able to sell their homes, lands, houses, castles, etc. while international real estate investors will search for real estate ads that will be classified based on various criteria.