To all of you to Schibsted Investor Day 2016 here in London. A very warm welcome to you, all of you here in the Andaz Hotel, and also to all of you watching our session live on the web. Maybe also you watch the recording afterwards that will be available at schibsted.com. I'm sure that several of you spent the morning watching the presidential debate. Truly interesting. We also have a very interesting day in front of us here today. My name is Lena K. Samuelsson. I've been a journalist and an editor for 30 years. I'm now working with communications and CSR, social responsibility within the Schibsted Group. I'm also one of the 10 members of Rolf Erik Ryssdal's executive team. It's been almost 2 years since we had an investor day last. That was in Barcelona.
I'm sure plenty of you were there. It's been about three years since last we met here in London. Three years is an eternity in our business, and it is a very, very long time, none the least in Schibsted. So we're looking very much forward to presenting today all the things that we have achieved and to talk about the ambitions we have going forward. The overall theme today is, as you see here, the driving long-term online growth. And to portray that for you, we have a program with many interesting presentations lined up for you on online growth, on media houses and publishing, on our ecosystem strategy, and none the least about our product and tech competence that we now invest heavily in. There will be an interactive session today. I hope you will all participate. We will have Q&As during the program.
There will also be a break at about 10:20 A.M., so you will have time to mingle and discuss with each other and with us about your reflections and ask more questions. Also, after today's program, we would like all of you, if possible, to stay and have lunch with us. Then there will be great possibility to talk further with all of us. Now to kick off today's program, let me welcome to the stage Ole Jaco , who is the Chairman of the Board of Schibsted.
Good morning, everybody. Thank you for your introduction. It's great to see so many turning up. When I was here two years ago, there were less people in the room. There are new faces here now. Some of them, I know, and some of them are here for the first time, but you're all most welcome. You talked about history, Elena. So let me go back 10 years. 10 years ago, 6 years ago, in 2010, Schibsted had thus far its best year ever. At that point in time, two-thirds of our profits came from our publishing assets. Today, we also produce good results, and now two-thirds of our profits come from our classified business.
Over these 6 years, we have invested heavily in organic growth in our classified business, but we have also used more than $1 billion in M&A to support the business. We have done that because we saw a very lucrative segment, and we wanted to reap the profits from that segment. Now, in developing this business over the last 6 years, we have been guided by our vision, shaping the media of tomorrow, today. We will continue to use that as our guiding principle in going forward. If you think about what is happening in the media industry today, there is a lot of clutter. There is a lot of talk about tech and tech companies. What is it that is really the key to the media of tomorrow? Well, to me, it is user centricity.
Schibsted as a company has to engage with our users. We have to explore what are crucial to empower our users in the future. If you do that correctly, we will be able to build a more trustworthy relationship with them. Schibsted's DNA contains disruption and entrepreneurship. In the past, we have been willing to invest rather boldly, I may say, in new ventures, and classified is a good example of that has had high risk, but also high potential. Now I wanted to draw your attention to one area that is not classified, because classified has been the focus so far, and that's our growth business. In the growth business, we have also used this notion of disruption and entrepreneurship.
With very limited investments, we have been able to build a billion-dollar revenue business, predominant in Sweden. This shows that it's not only in classified, but also in other areas where we can invest boldly and build profitable businesses. I think it's interesting these days to see the interest in publishing that we see from the large American tech companies. Why are they so interested in publishing? Well, it's certainly not for the content creation, because if you see what has happened recently, when Facebook had ran into difficulties in the editing of their pages with the Vietnam War photo scrimmage that they had with our Aftenposten newspaper, they would not try to get into that part of the business. Why they are so interested is because news generate engagement with the users.
This engagement, of course, is equivalent to advertising dollars. The Western European advertising market in digital is huge. $38 billion is it estimated to reach this year. Of course, there, for them, publishing is not a goal, it's a means to an end. Now, in, in talking about this, what I'm trying to drive at is if you look at these different areas that we have, the publishing, the growth, the classified business, this all comes together in what we call the ecosystem. The ecosystem strategy is taking what we see in the markets and combining our strength in order to pursue the advertising business that is available in today.
If you take Scandinavia, Norway and Sweden, you must remember that we have assets that if you combine their online users, we could match any American tech company. Then we really have to know our user and their buying habits and their intents. If you do so, then we can produce advertising sets that are interesting to our advertisers. This explains why we have been investing heavily in our tech capabilities in order to build these competencies. This will be important in securing our long-term competitive positions. We are implementing this in Scandinavia, but we can also see that these technologies, these components are scalable and that we can export them, and they will fit well with our classified assets throughout Europe.
These technical platforms running our combined operations are what I see the media of tomorrow. Our vision is then to develop this further, these platforms, so that they can represent an alternative to what we see the American tech companies are producing. As you can see, I'm optimistic, even if we are facing a troubled industry, and many are talking about the media industry as being troubled. Well, certainly, I think that Schibsted is in a good position to reap the profits of the many market opportunities that we see. We have been working a long time with creating shareholder value, and that's really what I'm looking for as a chairman, long-term shareholder value.
I hope and trust that you, during the day today, will see that we have many good initiatives that will show you that we're on the go. With this introduction, I'd like you to take part in the presentations that we have today. Then I return the word back to you, Lena. Thank you for your attention.
Without further ado, let's dive into this very exciting day. The first speaker from our management team is, of course, Rolf -Erik Ryssdal, who will tell you more about the exciting journey that we're on with Schibsted being a truly tech-driven media company and user-centric. Please, Rolf- Erik Ryssdal. Also let me point out that there will be a Q&A after Rolf- Erik and Sondre Gravir has spoken later.
Thank you very much, Lena. First of all, let me express a warm thank you for coming here today. This is an exciting day for us in Schibsted management. We've been looking forward to spending this morning with you. I hope you'll gain a deeper insight into our businesses. There'll be plenty of room for Q&A and also interaction with the management. I'm looking forward to telling you a story with my colleagues, which I believe will show you how Schibsted is well positioned for further online growth. It has been mentioned already that we are investing in product and tech. I think that is absolutely necessary.
It's all about creating better user experiences, we are now scaling up our product development in a manner that allows us to do better product development at higher quality than we have been doing traditionally. This is absolutely necessary in the competitive situation that we're seeing. by making these investments, we are enabling our growth story, both by creating further growth in our online classified business, also to capture new revenue streams in the verticals, and of course, the ecosystem strategy, which is ultimately about about increasing revenue, both for our online classifieds, for the media houses, and for the growth businesses. there's so many things going on in Schibsted. There's a lot of development taking place, which I'm proud of. if you look long-term about our strategy, we're following what I would describe as a steady course.
I don't think you'll hear too many surprises today. I hope you'll get to a deeper insight into our company. Our strategic goals have been the same throughout the last years. Now, you know our ambition of being a global leader in online classifieds. We've had that for a long time, and we are one of the global leaders. We want to reinforce that position. That's why we're investing. You've seen that we have developed our products better and also taken new positions. We'll spend a lot of time on that with Sondre and Susanna later during the day. Now, our traditional business or legacy business is the media houses. I think that's also an exciting business. I think that we have set ourselves an ambitious target even there.
We've said, this has been the assignment by the board, by the way, create world-class digital media houses. Well, it's a challenging task. I believe that we're well on the way of doing that. We're seeing a lot of interesting things happening there. We'll get more into that. In addition to that, we have the Schibsted Growth division, which is taking many new marketplaces, especially in Scandinavia, online. We've developed leadership in important spaces such as the fintech area in Scandinavia. We're ready to export some of those. At the heart and the bottom lines of this lies then the common product platforms and tech infrastructure, which is enabling us to pursue these strategic goals.
Before I dive into the future, let me recap a little bit what did we say last time we met in an investor day in Barcelona. We set out some targets and I just wanted to briefly touch upon them because we have actually achieved those targets we set out. The 15%-20% growth in the top-line classified growth. Says here 24%, 26%. That is in Norwegian krone, but even if you adjust for currency, we have achieved those goals. We've also delivered what we said we would deliver in the media houses. Looking ahead, I think an important message for me today is that we're maintaining and reaffirming our goal of 15%-20% top-line growth for our classifieds business. You know, we've been active in this field.
We've done a lot of organic investments. We've done some bolt-on acquisitions, and we've done some consolidation in the markets. We'll continue to pursue that strategy. We believe that there's much more to do for us in the verticals. We believe we can increase the revenue per user, and we believe that we become bigger in the markets that we already are. If history should be a guide to the future, that's always the interest, of course, but you can see here that what we have delivered is a rather steady growth for many years. Since the inception of FINN.no back in the year 2000, we have step-by-step built up our classifieds portfolio and have the good growth for many years. I think this picture also shows you that classifieds is a good industry to be in.
There's many others have done well in this business as well. Frankly, I believe that we're pretty good operators in this business. There's a lot of talent in Schibsted, a lot of competence in the classifieds field, and there's a lot of passion for this. This is an interesting business to be in, and I think there's much more to be done here. Now, this is really about obtaining number one positions. We're eager to do that. We learned that in Scandinavia, in Norway and Sweden, that is really where the big dollars are. That's why we've been pursuing the same strategy in the rest of Europe. I think many of you are familiar here with what we're doing in our positions in Spain and France.
You can see that also in a number of other European countries here, such as Italy and Ireland, Austria and Hungary, we're getting to interesting positions. You can see that we've done huge organic investments, and I believe this is an evidence that this strategy has paid off. Our strategy is then take number one positions, invest in traffic, and then later monetize. When we're looking at our, at our emerging market portfolio, it's really the same strategy that we're pursuing there. We'll get more into this today. From my point of view, I'm happy to see that we have a well-balanced portfolio these days. I think it's much more well-balanced toda y than it was two, three years back.
We got the, I would say, I wouldn't use the word mature, but let me say FINN.no and Blocket are really established market leaders. You see they have a solid revenue, but they continue to grow. We have positions in France and Spain. I think that is where you see a lot of the growth in the business will come the next few years. The other European companies that I just talked about are getting interesting positions. Of course, with the fastest growth are the one in the investment phase in emerging markets. I'm happy with this portfolio because it's a mix of the steady companies and the growth and also interesting opportunities for the future.
Now, today, we're not going to talk a lot about FINN.no and Blocket, but let me mention it briefly anyway, and I'll be happy to take questions because I'm very pleased with what I'm seeing in the development of these companies. If you ask any Norwegian, they will tell you that all the houses in Norway and all the cars in Norway, they've been on the FINN.no portal for more than 10 years, 12, 13 years. The thing is that this company continues to grow. Throughout all that period, we continue to grow the business. That is done by creating new services, new products, new products for dealers, new verticals, and also being much smarter in price optimization. If you move to Sweden, it's a similar position Blocket has had in generalist and also in cars for many years.
I believe that, especially in cars, there is still a lot of work to be done there. I think Raoul perhaps may touch upon that. We are actually developing new products for car dealers as we speak. The other positions that Blocket have is in jobs. There's no really clear market leader there. I think our two brands now are have the combined leadership. I think we can do much more in jobs. When it comes to real estate, after the Competition Authority turned down the acquisition of Hemnet, we had to reevaluate our alternatives there.
Let me show you another graph, just to illustrate the potential, you know, because as many of you know, especially those here in the UK, you have great companies like Auto Trader and Rightmove who are really good at monetizing the markets they're in. You can see in the real estate sector, FINN.no is doing very well, through the strategy they have pursued for many years that I just described, developing new products for real estate brokers. You can see in the car verticals that Auto Trader is really in a class of its own, I think they've been magnificent at what they're doing.
This, I debated a little bit with myself, whether to show this graph because this is, of course, not something that will happen overnight. I mean, there's long road. I think there is still. This illustrates to you that for those who are really good operators and have clear number one positions, then there are many interesting things you can develop further. Right. We, traditionally, we talk a lot about our positions in the large markets of FINN.no and Blocket and leboncoin and Spain, et cetera. I think it's, I'd like to point out that we are actually doing many interesting things also in the other markets. We are getting leading positions in other countries, in traffic such as Finland and Hungary.
In our emerging markets, we have good traffic positions. You can see that, albeit coming from a relatively low level, it's possible to increase the revenues of these, at a good pace. That's gives me a lot of confidence for our emerging market portfolio coming going forward. Now, since we're in the UK, let me also mention Shpock here. Shpock, you know, it's been advertised outside the door. I hope that many of you who live here, if you haven't downloaded it already, I think, encourage you to do so as soon as possible. Then you'll find an interesting and smart working marketplace.
This is relatively new product, you see it's, we have it in some countries, competitors have it in other countries. This is a native app, as we call it, a pure mobile marketplace. As you can see, they're gaining market share here in the UK. This gives us an interesting foothold in the UK, the biggest market in Europe where we're not present. I think this gives us some interesting options going forward. We'll get back to that a little bit more during the day. That's all for classifieds for now. Let me talk about the media houses.
That's also an industry where we are investing in new competence, we're investing in technology, and we have a passion for this business as well. This business is going through a huge transformation. We all know that. Print is going down and will continue to go down. Therefore, we've done cost restructuring that has been necessary, but there are also a number of good things happening in this industry. There is a growing number of digital subscriptions, and there is more personalized services coming up. Let me show you some graphs that shows you the engagements. There's high engagement level for the media houses in Scandinavia.
You can see that this shifts those positions in our home markets, Norway and Sweden, compared to, for instance, CNN in their home market, which is U.S. or the Washington Post or New York Times. You can see that we have a tremendous reach in our markets, a daily coverage of 60%-70% of the population. That allows us to develop interesting ad formats. I think it's interesting also when we talked about quality content. Remember a few years back, people said it's not going to be possible to charge for content online. I think that we've seen all of us that that proved to be wrong. If you look at young people, they're willing to pay for Netflix, they're willing to pay for Spotifys and other services.
What we're seeing, they're also now willing to pay for Aftenposten, Svenska Dagbladet, and our other titles. I think that is a positive sign. The thing is that in Norway, we had some subscription newspapers that have set themselves a goal of 100,000 pure digital subscribers this year. They're going to surpass that. The interesting thing is that it's also they're young people signing up for that. 30-35 years old are the kind of average age for those signing up for that. Web TV is another part of the business that is that is growing. Here we can see the market growth.
Of course, it's also going to be the future here is mobile and it's video, and it's important for us to be positioned in that. I think we are among the leaders in that in Scandinavia. Raul will come back and talk more about our growth business. Our growth business has developed into quite a substantial business, particularly in Sweden. I think we can do more there with those marketplaces. I think we can do more in Scandinavia, and I think we also can export some of those businesses outside. Interesting is also if you look at the data that these sites contribute, they contribute well into the ecosystem strategy. Here is a bit more of a difficult difficult graph.
I'm happy that my colleague, Rian, our CTO, will come later and explain more about it. About the ecosystem strategy. The ecosystem strategy is really about having a portfolio of digital assets that by working together, sharing traffic, sharing data, reinforce each other. The ultimate goal of that is, of course, to create better revenue streams. Particularly with the position we have in Scandinavia, we're enabled to do that. These assets are reinforcing each other. We can create better user products and better advertisement products. At the bottom of this lies the common tech and infrastructure platform. We have a high degree of logged in in Norway and Sweden, working hard on getting or increasing that. We have the advertisement platform.
We work together with an independent US company, AppNexus, which is a provider of the ad exchanges necessary in those markets. That has gotten off to a good start. On top of this, we build marketplace platforms for tomorrow and publishing platforms, and these are then being rolled out by our strong brands. We're seeing that working well for publishing, and we have high hopes also for the development that we're doing on marketplaces. This allows us, when we're working united like this allows us to create better products of higher quality than that are more scalable than before. We used to be a company with a lot of autonomy.
We still have strong brands, strong local management, but by sharing the development of the platforms, we're able to roll out new products better and faster. Going back to what the chairman said, this is really all about creating better product and better user experiences. Instead of me talking too much about the about the technicality of this, let me show you a short video that demonstrates some of the features that we see will be coming for the marketplaces for tomorrow. This is why we are investing in product and tech to make better products for our users. I can tell you the marketplaces of tomorrow will look much better and much smoother user experience than what you're seeing today. This will come soon. The things we're working on here is already in the process of being rolled out.
To sum it up, I'm looking forward to sharing this day with you. I think we're well positioned to continue our online growth story. I'm looking forward to giving you a deeper insight into our businesses. That's all from me for now. I'm looking forward to spending the rest of the morning with you. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Rolv Erik. We will see more of you today, of course. Now, let's dive in a little bit more into our exciting marketplaces. We will do that with a man who's been in Schibsted for some years. He's held many different interesting positions, and right now Sondre Gravir is the EVP for Established Marketplaces. After Sondre's presentation, there will be a Q&A, and Rolv Erik will also join him for that. Note that there is an extensive Q&A at the end with the CFO and of course with the CEO at the end of the session today before lunch. Thank you.
Thank you, Lena. Good morning. Great to see you all here. I'm excited to share some more insights on our European classified operations outside the Scandinavia. My key messages for you today are the following. Number one, we see potential to further monetize our superior traffic positions by moving stronger into the verticals and to deliver stronger vertical specific products in all our markets. Secondly, we are investing heavily in our global product and tech effort, both globally and locally, to support this move into the verticals. Thirdly, we see strong growth for Shpock, expanding the online classified markets we're currently operating in. Let's start look into our different markets. Our European classified operations comprises both the traditional online classified models and Shpock, and we are present in big markets with significant opportunities for further growth.
We see sizable differences across our markets in the digital ad spend penetration, and we expect the total addressable market to grow significantly going forward. In, for example, France and Spain, we see that digital ad spend is only 20%-25% of the total ad spend in the market compared to a mature market like here in the UK, where the digital ad spend consists approximately 50% of the market. Looking at the car market in Italy as an example, in Italy there's around 37.5 million cars. It's the second biggest car market in Europe after Germany. It's ahead of France, it's ahead of the UK, and still the online classified market for cars in Italy is estimated to be only EUR 30 million. It's approximately 20% of what we think the total addressable market will be in the future.
This will change going forward. Looking into our different positions, this chart also was a part of Rolv Erik's presentation. We have strong positions already in many of the verticals in our markets. We have started with a very strong generalist good position and then used the superior traffic position and the strong brand positions to expand into the verticals, especially into the car and real estate vertical. We have been focusing a lot on the private user needs in our product development historically. Going forward, we will focus more on the professional customers in our product development, hence giving the car dealers and the real estate agents, the recruiters, et cetera, deeper vertical specific functionality that will cover a broader part of the customer's value chain and hence generate better revenues.
Let's look into some of our biggest markets, starting of course with France and leboncoin. As you know, leboncoin has a very strong position in France. It's the fifth most used digital service, and the traffic has been growing constantly since the launch 10 years ago and is still developing positive, driven by mobile growth. Today, we see 25 million monthly users on leboncoin, generating more than 200 million daily page impressions. It's impressive numbers. More than 60% of leboncoin's traffic come from mobile. In total, there are 800,000 ads being posted on leboncoin every day, and since the launch 10 years ago, in total 1 billion ads have been posted on the platform.
This year, we are celebrating the 10 years anniversary of leboncoin, and it's been a great year. We have relaunched leboncoin with new design and full responsive functionality, and President Hollande visited the 10-year birthday Thursday 2 weeks ago, showing the whole of France the importance of leboncoin. Of course, the seller that posted the ad number 1 billion was also present at the birthday party. It was actually a red Dolce Gusto coffee machine that was posted, and we invited him with his wife to join the party together with more than 1,000 of leboncoin's most valued customers. Looking into the financials of leboncoin, which you all know very well, we have seen strong development in both revenue and EBITDA over the last 10 years, continuing into the first half year of 2016.
We believe that we are able to deliver strong growth also going forward. Let's then dive into the different verticals of leboncoin, starting with real estate. The French online classified market for real estate is estimated to be around EUR 380 million. We see 830,000 buy and sell transactions every year. The split between private part of the market and the professional part of the market is around 40-60. In this market, leboncoin has now really gotten a strong position. In traffic, we are more than 60% bigger than our closest competitor, and in number of total listings, we are 30% bigger. We are very close to surpassing SeLoger in terms of professional content on the platform, and currently we see a very high growth rate for leboncoin in this area.
We are the market leader in terms of the number of real estate agents using our platform. We believe that we will be able to further monetize in the French real estate market by growing volume, but also, as I said in the beginning, by launching new dedicated products for the real estate agents. An example being this dashboard, as you can see here, we launched some weeks ago, where agents can manage and review the performance of all their ads live on the mobile and also making different upselling products for the real estate agents, very easy accessible. We are now stepping up the product development in this area. Moving into cars in France, we also see a very strong position for leboncoin and a good development at the moment. We have by far the biggest inventory and 70% more traffic than our closest competitor.
The online classified car market in France is estimated to be around EUR 120 million. We are experimenting strong growth at the moment. We have more than 80% of the car dealers in France on our platform. Also here, we will continue to develop new products for the car dealers, examples being car dealer dashboards, car dealer management inventory systems, and also pricing tools. Both in cars and real estate, we will see positive effects from our global efforts within product and tech, enabling us to share functionality and products across sites and markets, which is especially important for our vertical positions. To the last, and maybe from my point of view, one of the most exciting initiatives going on in leboncoin at the moment, jobs. We already have a very strong position in ads and traffic for jobs.
We are number one, as you can see, in terms of active listings. We are currently growing our traffic significantly. We estimate the total online classified markets for job in France to be around EUR 135 million, being even stronger and bigger market than the car market. Currently, as you can see, leboncoin has a very low share of this revenue pool. We are currently pushing hard on both product development and marketing, resulting in 20% traffic growth and 60% growth in listings in the job area over the last couple of months for leboncoin. leboncoin is a very efficient marketplace for jobs. It takes only around in average 13 days for an advertiser to fill a position when posting the job ad on leboncoin.
This is a great starting point as we are soon, very soon, introducing monetization models in this vertical. We believe that we will see a strong growth for the job vertical in leboncoin going forward, both driven by relevant product offering to recruiters and to applicants, but also, of course, leveraging the strong brand and traffic of leboncoin. We are very focused on both the user needs and the recruiters' needs when doing our product development, and we will have a complete product offer with automatic imports, solution for corporate communications, and so on the platform. Here, you are looking at the pro dashboard launched for jobs in July on mobile. This again, is a dashboard, the same type as I showed for real estate agents, where recruiters can track several KPIs for their ads constantly.
For example, number of ad views, number of phone clicks, and also the live conversion to their HR landing page in the companies. leboncoin are and will continue to deliver very strong on these KPIs due to the superior traffic position. In addition to a strong push on product development, as I said, we are also pushing hard on marketing and PR at the moment in France. In June, we had a massive buzz around Sarkozy's visit in the leboncoin office after stating that he really didn't know what leboncoin was a couple of days earlier. We've been present at job fairs around the country, and we have a strong presence in offline and online media at the moment. Let's have a look at the current commercial running for jobs in France.
As you can understand, we are optimistic in, of the development of the job vertical in leboncoin going forward. If you noticed, one of the head wordings on one of Rolv Erik's slide in the introduction, you also saw a new name under the list of acquisitions. Today we are announcing the acquisition of MB Diffusion in France, which is a leading marketplace for agriculture and construction equipment, present also in some other markets and shaped up also for further international expansion. We see strong synergies with leboncoin in this company, both on sales, on technology, it's a marketplace like leboncoin, and of course, on traffic. Hence, we see a significant potential to further grow the user base, the customer base, and also the revenues, which were EUR 11 million in 2015.
We have also launched new solutions in the ad market over the last couple of months in France. These solutions are based on, as Rolv Erik mentioned in his introduction, our global product offering within the advertising area. With leboncoin, we offer advertisers strong contextual value, we offer strong intent data, and of course, we have good geo-data. We are also improving our programmatic offering and our self-service solutions as we speak. Now, leboncoin is a fully fledged provider of targeted advertising solutions, both to small SME enterprises through their self-service solutions, but also to bigger national clients. We believe that leboncoin will be able to take a bigger market share in the French advertising market going forward. Summarized, as you understand, we are very satisfied with the development of leboncoin at the moment.
It's a great team growing leboncoin's position in all verticals and with a very strong dedication in the team to serve our users and customers the best way possible. Let's move into Spain. We have seen a solid financial performance over the last quarters in Spain, year-on-year revenue growth slowed down in Q1 to Q2 to 13% in Q2, and we expect a high single-digit growth for Q3. Competition has increased in both generalist against Wallapop and in the real estate vertical towards idealista. We are confident that we will deliver on our midterm growth plans in Spain. Moving into the verticals, here we start with cars. Currently, the online car classified market in Spain is estimated to be around EUR 40 million.
In cars in Spain, we are the clear market leader, both in traffic and in content, both on web and on mobile. We have a very strong position with Milanuncios. We also see solid growth for our dedicated car vertical in Spain, Coches, with the launch also now on the new Coches app. Midterm, a key growth driver for the Spanish car market for Schibsted will be the recovery of the Milanuncios license effective from February 2017. With this move, we recover full flexibility in defining a thorough cross-platform product offering to all user segments and customers in the Spanish car market. This will be an important revenue driver for Spain in 2017.
We will also in Spain continue to invest heavily in our dedicated product offering to car dealers with both local and global initiatives. Moving into real estate, the online classified market for real estate in Spain is estimated to be around EUR 85 million. It's a fragmented market in the professional area with more than 24,000 real estate agents. We have a strong position in the Spain real estate market with a dedicated real estate vertical, Fotocasa, but also strong positions with Vibbo and Milanuncios in the real estate area. Looking at the competitive situation against idealista, we are far ahead of idealista in terms of traffic and content on a total level across Schibsted assets in Spain. Comparing idealista only with Fotocasa, idealista is bigger in traffic, but Fotocasa is the market leader in terms of both total content and professional content.
We are also in the real estate area, investing strongly in product development, and we will launch new product features throughout this fall and throughout 2017 to maintain our number 1 position in the Spanish real estate market. We have just launched a new responsive version some weeks ago on Fotocasa, and the early KPI development, especially in terms of generating leads to real estate agents, are very encouraging. Moving into jobs in Spain, and InfoJobs is, of course, as you know, one of the pillars of Schibsted Spain. On InfoJobs, we have more than 700,000 jobs opportunities being posted over the last 12 months.
As a Schibsted employee, I just have to say that this is truly an example of how we live our mission, empowering people in their daily lives, having so many great job opportunities being posted in the market, facing so high unemployment rates. Currently, we see somewhat softer revenue growth for InfoJobs. This is not because we are losing ground in terms of volume or traffic. We see good development on both of those two metrics, and we have 80% of the traffic on InfoJobs, 80% coming from mobile. The growth on InfoJobs is currently fueled by the development in the tourist industry in Spain, resulting in a change of InfoJobs customer mix, hence softening the revenue growth.
All verticals in Spain, of course, both the real estate vertical, but also display advertising and jobs, is affected by the macro development in Spain. As I said in the beginning, we remain positive on our midterm growth potential in Spain, and we will continue to invest strongly in both product development in the verticals and in the generalist area and in marketing to support this growth going forward. For the jobs market, we also see growth opportunities in the SME part of the market and the blue-collar part of the market, and we have also just launched a new app addressing that market, Workzy, in a beta version in the Valencia region just some weeks ago. Looking into the generalist goods area in Spain, we are number 1 in terms of audience with Milanuncios and Vibbo.
Wallapop is currently bigger in terms of daily new ads in the Spanish market. Wallapop also have a much stronger mobile position. We will, going forward, invest significantly resources both locally in Spain and supported by our global product and tech effort to develop new mobile-specific functionality on our product offering in the Spanish market. We will also ramp up marketing investments that's been on hold for a little while in the generalist market in Spain, going forward. Now in September, we already see encouraging results from the marketing campaign we have been doing for Vibbo.
To summarize Spain, we have strong positions in the verticals, but we are facing increased competition, so we will continue our dedicated effort to improve our product offering, to do strong marketing activities, and we will also, in the Spanish market, improve our advertising offering to display advertising customers when we are launching our global ad product solutions in the beginning of 2017. Moving into Italy, where we have InfoJobs and Subito. In Italy, we are, as you can see, the clear market leader in generalist goods, with significant higher volume of new ads approved every day than our competitors. The focus for Italy now is to strengthen the position within the verticals, especially in cars and real estate, sorry, cars and jobs.
In the real estate market, Subito has a very strong position in content driven by private listings, which makes up a significant share of the real estate transaction in the Italian market. We are stepping up our initiative on jobs with InfoJobs Italy, having all the same product improvements as we are doing in InfoJobs Spain. Looking into the car vertical, we are somewhat bigger than AutoScout in terms of total content. It's driven by the private listings because AutoScout is bigger than us in the professional content area. Also here, we will increase our product development efforts towards the car dealers in the Italian market, ramping up our professional position. This work has already started, and we have launched new car dealer shop and also a car dealer management inventory system in the Italian market.
Also in Italy, we will launch our global ad offering, increasing Subito's market share in the Italian advertising market early 2017. I will also give you a quick overview of Ireland and Hungary with two products examples from each of those markets. In Ireland, as you know, we are present with multiple brands through our 50/50 JV. We have DoneDeal, the leading generalist, and the leading car site, and we have Daft, the number one real estate site, and Adverts, also a generalist site. In terms of traffic, again, we are number one in both cars and real estate. Only number one in real estate when it comes to professional content. As for our other markets, the focus in Ireland at the moment is to continue the push into the verticals to increase monetization from the verticals.
As an example, DoneDeal has recently launched a customized homepage, taking users that have already searched for cars on DoneDeal onto a car-focused landing page next time they visit DoneDeal. You can still search for the everyday goods items below, but they have to actively select it. This is just one of many examples of the push into the car vertical in Ireland, resulting in strong revenue growth in this vertical year-over-year. In Hungary, we are present with two brands, Jófogás, and the car vertical specialist site, Használtautó. Jófogás is after the merger with OLX in 2015, the clear leading generalist site in Hungary. Our combined number one position in cars is also very strong, both in private and professional content.
In real estate, we are number one in traffic, but not in professional content, and we have recently stepped up our product focus on the real estate vertical with, for example, launching a dedicated real estate app. In Jófogás, they are ramping up the monetization efforts in the private market. An example of this, as you can see here on the slide, is the launch of a delivery service. When the seller posts a ad on Jófogás, the seller can add the delivery service to its listing and will appear next to the ad in the listing page. Jófogás is also handling the payment and will deduct the payment and the fee for the delivery when making the transaction between the buyer and seller.
This is one among many monetization features being launched in the private market, driving revenue growth in the private part of the classified revenues in Hungary. This was an overview of our different markets, let's talk about Shpock, which Rolf Erik also briefly mentioned in his introduction. Shpock is our mobile native app currently running in 6 markets: Austria, Germany, UK, Italy, Sweden, and Norway. At the moment, we see very encouraging and strong growth for Shpock across our markets, both in terms of traffic and listings, having approximately 1.6 million downloads every month. Shpock is a great product. It's very user-friendly, and it's easy to use. We see very high engagement on the platform.
So the engagement, both in terms of daily visits and in terms of page impression per user, is higher on Shpock compared to our traditional classified sites. And on Shpock, all the transactions between the buyer and sellers are happening on the platform between logged-in user, generating very interesting user data that we can use to target advertised products but also to improve the product going forward. Let's have a look on how it works. So as I said, it's easy and fast. And as Rolf Erik said, if you haven't already tried it, I recommend that you download it, so you can get rid of some of the stuff you don't really need. The best thing maybe with Shpock is that it works.
It works so well, the sales rate we see on the platform is also higher than what we see on our traditional generalist sites. What we are also seeing with Shpock is that Shpock is expanding the classified market in the markets we're in. Our traditional classified sites are typically mirroring the demographic in the market, Shpock reach a younger and more urban audience. As an example, looking into Shpock in Germany, 68% of the total users are below 35 years old. The Shpock brand awareness is also stronger among the younger part of the population, and comparing with Kleinanzeigen, we are as strong in the brand awareness in the younger segments, according to our market service.
In Germany and UK, we are attacking new markets with Shpock, and in, for example, Italy, we are expanding the total Schibsted footprint in the classified market. Shpock is activating new user segments and new objects in the markets. They're ad-addressing some of the different part of the market than what we for example see with Subito. This is proven that after the launch of Shpock in Italy, we have seen very strong growth with Shpock. At the same time, as you can see, Subito has continued strong growth, both in terms of traffic and number of listing.
The effect is that we are covering the full part of the Italian classified market, also expanding the market. We expect the strong growth for Shpock to continue going forward, and we will increase both the product and product development resources in Shpock, supported by our global product and tech efforts, and the marketing investment in Shpock going forward. We have also proven that we are able to launch Shpock very fast in new markets if we think that would create value, as we did with the launch of Shpock in Norway, Sweden, and Italy just over a few weeks. In addition to a strong growth focus in Shpock at the moment, and also going forward, we have started to introduce monetization models on the Shpock platform.
We are implementing both proven monetization models that we see from our other markets. We will also experiment with new monetization models. As I said, being so close to the transaction, where the transaction is actually happening on the platform on Shpock, this generates great data that we can use, for example, to create new, very targeted advertising products for e-commerce players. It's also possible to use this data to unlock new private revenue streams, for example, by taking part of the payment transaction and introducing delivery services. All in all, we are very satisfied with the development of Shpock. It's a great team based in Vienna, really pushing the Shpock brand and product further in our markets. This was a summary of our European classified operations. Let me again state the three areas I started with.
We will increase monetization by a push into the verticals. This will be supported by our global product and tech effort. Thirdly, we see strong development of Shpock, which will continue going forward. We are always very ambitious on our own development, We are truly dedicated to deliver both on the user needs and the customer needs in the verticals going forward, resulting in revenue growth in our European operations. I hope that you all, wherever you are based, both you here in the room and also on webcast, wherever you are based in Europe, I hope that you all are using our products and that you really feel that we are delivering on your specific user needs. If not, you're just probably a very special user.
If you're a general user, please reach out, and I promise you, we will improve. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Sondre. They can just call you perhaps with comments. We'll start already now for diving into this and engaging in the content. We will have a Q&A. I will also ask Rolf Erik to join Sondre on stage. There will be mics sent around in the room. You will raise your hand and say, "I wanna ask something, I wanna reflect on something." Please wait until you have the mic, because we have a lot of people following this on the webcast, so that they can hear you and take part in this discussion. Please state your name and your institution when you ask your question. Who will be first? Raise your hands. Here you go.
Hi, there. It's Marcus here from JP Morgan. Two questions, one for Sondre. You highlighted very well the opportunity in jobs in France. Could you tell us a bit more how you see the progress in the next 3 to 4 years? It's more the question. Jobs has been a vertical which has been very fragmented. There's always the concern from the big ones when we look at the U.S., I mean, LinkedIn clearly had an impact on Monster. If you could tell us a bit more here, if there's also chance of a development of a, not dominant, but really market-leading platform here in France, that would be helpful. The other question is for Rolf Erik. Clearly, you highlighted it's now much more about execution going still into new verticals in the areas you're in.
In terms of geographies, should we really think that there are still an opportunity to go into new territories, through M&A, or is that really not the case from here?
Okay, I can start with the job product offering in France. As you say, it's a very fragmented market with several players in the market. Also, as you saw from our revenue chart, the revenue is distributed among those players. Leboncoin has historically or already a very strong position in the blue collar part of the market, and we have now partly migrated the product offering also to the white collar part of the market, which will be the focus going forward. It's also the focus in the monetization models we will launch in just a couple of weeks. Then we will, of course, by combining both the product offering and the strong traffic position of Leboncoin in other verticals, drive the growth of the job vertical.
When it comes to now commenting specifically on the revenue targets, et cetera, for the job vertical, I won't do that. We are very optimistic, especially looking at the growth we have seen just over the few couple of months. As I said, during the 5 last months, we have grown traffic by 20% and listing by 60%, showing that we are really delivering on the user and customer needs in the French job market.
That's obviously an exciting opportunity for us. I mentioned also that we want to expand our positions in the markets that we're already in. I think we can do that through organic growth, and we can do it through bolt-on acquisitions. As you know, we've been very value creative, and we've done in-market consolidations. You know, the big deal with Naspers and Telenor, SPH. We've done it in Ireland, in, in Morocco. I think we'll continue to look for those markets. Will be very interesting to strengthening our footprint in markets that we already are. We'll also look at some adjacent markets.
Okay, we have a question in the back.
Hi, this is Karan Danthi from Tybourne. I think it's very encouraging today to see, you know, the, I guess the number of times you've mentioned, new tools, you know, especially for the verticals, as well as obviously the traffic development with Schibsted. It seems like on an underlying basis, the pace of innovation is accelerating, which is very heartening. Could you perhaps just delve into how the tech team is organized? How you incent them? Who runs the team today? What's the person's profile? Do you plan to add more heads? Where are you weak? Where are you strong? I think, if this were to continue, this would be quite positive to enlarging the TAM, and, you know, maybe accelerating monetization.
Right. Well, you know, we've, we set ourself a target, a couple of years back to build up, actually world-class competence within product and tech. Since then, we have built up a tech hub here in London. We're especially good in the advertisement field. We have hubs in Barcelona, Oslo, and Stockholm, and also one in Poland. We added a lot of new competence there with some top people coming with the background from Google, Yahoo, and other places. Our leader, he has a long background by being one of the persons who built up Google's engineering division in Europe. Well, you know, our chief data scientist had the same position in Twitter previously.
When we get some of those big talents, we see there's also others are interested in coming to us. I'm very happy by the people that we're able to attract. To really speed up the innovation, what we're doing, which I touched upon, is that we're moving into more of a matrix organization where the product and tech people out in the fields, they will get two reporting points. They'll report to their local manager, but they'll report hardline to the central product and tech guys. This is really to use the scale that we're having and improve the quality and speed of innovation.
It was quite powerful because last week, for the first time, we gathered all the developers in our system, and around 1,500 had a big kickoff conference. We called it a Reboot in Barcelona. There you could really feel that there was a lot of passion and interest in speeding up our innovation and development. This has been the main focus for us. Now I see that we're starting to harvest some of the fruits from that.
Just also an example from the vertical area, which creates a lot of excitement in the local product and tech team in the companies working in the verticals, that we are now able to share functionality, as you mentioned, tools for example, car dealers across our markets. We are currently experimenting with a car dealer dashboard in the Swedish market in Blocket. When this product is finished developed, we have we will be able to integrate that product functionality also to several other sites, improving the product offering in the tools area in several markets at the same time.
joining forces and really recruiting top talent. Other questions, we have one over here, and then I think we have one in the front.
Hi. My name is Ian. I'm from Stockholm School of Economics. Thanks for the interesting presentations. Actually, it was in the news when you tried to acquire Hemnet, that the competition authorities did indeed block that, and you mentioned that in your presentation. I'm just interested to know, just curious, what is your plan then for Blocket, going forward or for the real estate vertical in that sense in the Swedish market?
Yeah. You know, I think I mentioned that. Well, let me first comment briefly on that decision. That was a disappointment. I think we had top legal advisors in Stockholm that told me that this was going to go through. We were disappointed by that decision, obviously. What I said is that we're now reevaluating our options there. I think we have, you know, if you look at the combined traffic of Schibsted, if you look at the strength of Blocket, we have some interesting opportunities for how to move forward. Out of competitive reasons, I don't want to go into that here now.
Another question up front here, and then one in the back. Yeah. Okay.
Yes. Hi, Rasmus Engberg with Handelsbanken. I was wondering on your historical numbers, on the online classifieds revenue growth, how much did sort of roughly come from acquisitions, and how do you see that going forward?
Well, the majority of it has come from organic growth. Perhaps from your presentation, you'll get a little bit more into the details there.
Do you see this as an increasing contribution from in-market consolidation or how do you regard the future?
Well, I would say that, you know, the effect that M&A has played last few years has been limited. It's been through bolt-on acquisitions. I think they will create a better revenue potential going forward. You know, we still have a very strong ambition for our organic growth.
The acquisition you announced today, are you able?
What is that?
to shed some light on how these acquisitions are priced? This is very difficult to find in the quarterly report.
Yeah. You mean the one we announced then? There's the agreement with the sellers that we're not going to disclose the price, but I think this is a fair deal for both parties. What I'm excited about this company is, you know, they're working in a niche with very high value items. I think that, you know, you could really, based on the knowledge we already have in leboncoin, then we can really expand upon that and use our knowledge there to develop new products. I think it's also I'm quite excited because I think this can be done also in other European countries. I think the chairman actually had a comment here, Lena.
Sure.
Absolutely.
To address your question, I can say that it is part of our strategy to go on and do acquisitions. However, as you all know, the pricing level for assets in this area now are rather demanding. We have to balance the prices that we see with the opportunities. Since we have such strong organic growth, of course, that is all in all a much more economical way to produce growth. We'll do both, but we'll try to use savvy in how we evaluate acquisitions.
Thank you. I think we're down there. Yes.
Hi, it's Catherine from Citi. Firstly, you talked about starting to monetize Shpock. I wondered if you just could give a bit more detail on what you're doing and what the early signs have been. Secondly, you talked about Wallapop competition in Spain, which is a mobile-based proposition. I just wondered what makes you confident that you won't have a similar impact in other markets from Shpock or other sort of mobile-based propositions. How did you come about the decisions to launch Shpock in some of your existing markets and not in others?
First of all, on the monetization, we see good development in the monetization in Shpock in Germany and UK at the moment. As I said, now what we have launched is proven monetization models like bumps and upselling products for the private market and targeted native advertising products in the commercial market. This we will continue to roll out going forward. As I said, also use the transaction data that is being generated on the platform to expand the monetization models. In terms of the competition or in the way the view of expanding the markets, of course, we can never be 100% sure how the market will develop. What we have seen, as I showed with the example from Italy, that is really expanding the market.
It's attracting new audience and younger segments, to the classified market. As I said, we have seen stronger growth of Subito this year than compared to previous years. At the same time, we have launched Shpock in the market, delivering strong on the growth metrics for Shpock. In terms of market assessments, we thought that it would be good to launch Shpock in the Italian market, as we didn't have any strong position of native apps running in that market. We will constantly review going forward if we think we can create value by introducing Shpock in new markets. As I said, we have proven that we can do that within very short time.
Okay, I think we have a question from the gentleman in the light shirt over there.
Could you please, stand up, you, sir? Thank you.
Preben Rasch-Olsen, Carnegie. Quick question. You've had very strong growth in revenue for the past three years. Not so much have happened on the profitability side. The question is, do you have the man in place, the infrastructure in place, basically the cost base you need to achieve the 15%-20% growth going forward? Should we expect the EBITDA margin in the classified to start to improve in the coming years?
Well, I think, you know, there's some elements to that. One is the amount that we have been spending on organic growth, right? Obviously after we did the deal in Brazil, then that decreased, and we're spending some money on Shpock. I think this is, that's well-spent money that we're investing for the future. Then we're also building up some product competence in product and tech, and I think that's also a very good investment. Then I think as a result of this consolidation and the new organization, then I think if you look not in 2017, but perhaps 2018, you'll start seeing effects of that rationalization.
We have a question from the gentleman here on the left. Then I think we will have, maybe one more. Please note there will be more Q&As as we go along.
Hi, Adil from IK Investment Partners. In the introduction you talked about how important return to shareholders are for you. Can you please just share a little bit of the thinking about metrics such as return on capital, return on equity? What are you thinking around that? Also, when you're doing these deals, what kind of targets do you set for your, for team who actually does the acquisitions? Thank you very much.
Well, we have Trond will get back to the financial targets and the return targets. Obviously, when we work with setting targets, we always evaluate, you know, how much will it cost to come to the number one position in the markets that we're in. If we're there, then we know the results will be tremendous. When we look at the acquisition pricing, as the chairman mentioned, we try to be cautious, but that's why we've been doing a lot in the markets that we're already in, such as with the last one we announced there, because then we see a lot of a lot of synergies. I think and I think we are.
I would say I'm more among the more prudent players in this market. That's why we passed on some other acquisitions that we thought were, you know, too pricey. We're industrial players, we like to develop the businesses ourselves. Trond will get more back to the specific targets.
Okay, one more question down on the left there. Yes.
Thank you. Martin Sandstede, Danske Bank. First I wanted to follow up on Shpock. It's great to see, some more insights there, could you please say something about the revenue or EBITDA levels in Shpock overall?
We're not commenting specifically on the revenue levels or EBITDA levels in Shpock.
Okay. What about other countries in Europe? You have expanded into 6, and I'm sure there are other very interesting markets for you. Could you comment on any other markets?
Well, you know, I think, you know, our competitors would love that for us to answer that question.
We too.
I think for obvious reasons I don't think that would be the wise thing for us to do. I think you actually have to wait and follow our development there, Martin.
Yeah.
I can just say that just succeeding in two big markets like Germany and UK is interesting in itself.
What about Spain then? I mean, Wallapop is very strong in Spain. I'm sure you have some thoughts about not launching Shpock in Spain. Could you reconsider that?
I think the key focus in Spain going forward would be to develop the product functionality in Vibbo and Milanuncios with the all, or many of the same key features that are making Wallapop strong in the market and Shpock strong in our other markets. Have the same functionality in terms of proximity search, in terms of real-time messaging, et cetera. With the global product and tech effort and with the initiative that was shown in Roar Færseth's video in the presentation, and also with the functionality we see in our assets, we think we can be competitive also on the product side with Vibbo and Milanuncios in the Spanish market without necessarily launching Shpock.
We have a lot of product competence in the group. We'll use that because the development in Spain will be very important for us. We'll devote a lot of the resources into that. Exactly which brands are going to be launched under is not something we'll comment on now.
Okay, one more. FINN, mid-2014 you moved to a freemium model on the general list vertical. We can see now that the volume has increased, you know, tremendously. Of course you lost, let's say, 4% of the top line at that time. Could you comment on what kind of returns you have seen since then? Not in terms of ad listing volume, but in terms of, let's say, other revenue streams or EBITDA on back of that move to freemium. Thank you.
You know, if you look at the development in the traffic on FINN at the moment and the increase in number of visits, it's developing very strong. The engagement on the platform is also increasing. The increased engagement, of course, gives us opportunities to further monetize on advertising, to further drive traffic into profitable verticals like jobs and real estate, and also improve our data capturing on the platform. I think it's, I think it's difficult to, you know, be exact on the return on the investment in terms of going freemium, but for the overall FINN product and for the position in the different verticals, it has significantly improved the position and driving still traffic growth on FINN.
Thank you for now. There will be more occasions to have Q&As later during the program. Thank you both. Now let's move further into the world of marketplaces and our emerging markets. Gianpaolo Santorsola is the Executive Vice President for this business unit. He could not be here today. We will hear from Susanna Grill Erntell, who's the CFO of Schibsted Emerging Markets, and she will talk about how this is a key source of growth and geographic diversification. Thank you.
Thank you, Lena. Good morning, everyone. I'm happy to be here to give you some insight to the world of Schibsted outside Europe, to the fast-growing markets and operations in the emerging markets. As Lena said, spread across 12 different markets and three continents, this portfolio constitutes an important source of geographic diversification and revenue growth potential. In most of these markets, we are enjoying market-leading positions across all the key vertical segments in terms of traffic and content. We've successfully achieved these positions over the past couple of years through organic investments, selective acquisitions, and partnerships. We're now at a new level. Our focus have shifted from building these positions to leveraging them and ramping up the monetization by moving further into the vertical segments of real estate and cars. The first results of these is. Let me show this slide as well.
The first results of these are encouraging, and we've also managed to reduce the marketing spending in these markets significantly. The combined effects of ramping up monetization and reduced marketing spend has led to a lowered investment level across the portfolio. Let's have a look at the portfolio then. It's a big portfolio covering in total 1 billion people. Almost many of them are young. Almost half of our users are below 25 years of age. The internet penetrations in these markets is around 50%, but growing quickly, as many of these predominantly young users are accessing the internet over their mobile phone for the first time. On the map, you will see that our 100% owned entities are marked in blue, and our JVs are marked in orange.
In LATAM, we have a mix of both 100% owned entities and JVs. In Africa, we're present in two markets, both of them are 100% owned, while in Asia, we're only represented through JVs. The portfolio is also quite diverse in terms of market size and maturity, but many of the markets are quite big. If we compare the digital ad spend in these markets, as estimated by eMarketer today and in 2020, you will see that already today, some of these markets are as big as the more mature European one as Sondre just introduced you to. Many of these markets are also growing quickly. eMarketer estimates double-digit annual growth rates in the digital ad spend up until 2020. With this growth rate, the Brazilian market will have outgrown France, and Mexico will have outgrown Mexico by 2020.
This is, of course, something that we see as an exciting opportunity. Looking at our operations in these markets. These are a few examples of our market positions, and as you will see, most of our sites are market-leading in the key vertical segments of everyday generalist goods, car, and real estate. Over the past couple of years, we have successfully executed on our strategy for online classifieds in the emerging markets. By rolling out organic investments, making selective acquisitions and partnerships, we've achieved these strong market positions and been able to consolidate the markets. We've managed to build from the strong traffic positions that we've had in the generalist goods segments to also become big in the car and real estate segments. With few exceptions, the job vertical is yet not a focus in these markets.
From experience, we've seen that developing the white collar job vertical takes longer time from the generalist position. In the emerging market portfolio, the focus is still on cars and real estate. It's from these strong positions, where we are market-leading in terms of traffic and content, that we're now ramping up monetization by deepening our presence in the vertical, creating commercial relationships with car dealers and real estate agents and property developers across all the markets in the portfolio so that we can become leading also in terms of revenues. In the coming slides, I will tell you a bit more about the highlighted markets on this slide. I will give you a few examples of products development efforts that we're doing and what is happening on the revenue side in these markets. Let's first take a look at Brazil.
In Brazil, we're present with two sites, OLX, which we own through a partnership with Telenor and Naspers, and InfoJobs Brazil. In 2015, we merged our Brazilian operation, Bom Negócio, with Naspers site OLX. It's a great example of market consolidation. When you add 1 plus 1, the result of that actually equals more than 2. OLX has a very strong number 1 position in the generalist segment, but we've also managed to create strong position in the car and real estate segments. In the car vertical, we compete with Webmotors, among others. It's owned by Santander, the bank, as well as the global vertical player in cars, Carsales. OLX is now bigger, both in terms of traffic, listers, and ads.
In real estate, we're in competition with local players ZAP and VivaReal, but we see that OLX is already bigger in terms of traffic and listers. On the jobs side, InfoJobs is performing well from a number two position, growing both in terms of revenues and ads, revenues and traffic, despite a difficult market situation in Brazil. We see that for some of our competing job sites in Brazil, the revenues are decreasing. We feel quite satisfied with this development that we have. Looking then at what we're doing on the product development side and what is happening on the revenues. Let me give you an example from OLX. OLX is gradually introducing a lot of new monetization features. On the screen here, you will see one example of a visibility feature.
Users will buy this feature to make their ad more visible on the site. The specific product is the gallery product. The way it works is that, say that you're a real estate agent and you want to advertise this nice house with a garden. You go to OLX, and you buy the gallery product, and your nice house with a garden ad will stick on the top of the listing page for seven days. This is a product that users also can buy on the mobile in the app. These visibility products are bought through a premium model, so it's an optional fee that users can pay when they list their ad or later. We've seen the introduction of these has been well-received, and we've seen a strong development in revenues.
On the right-hand side of the graph, you will see the growth in professional classified revenues in OLX, which since the start of the year is up four times. That is promising results so far. OLX has also, even more recently than what is shown in the graph, rolled out ad insertion fees in the car and real estate segment. Ad insertion fees is a compulsory fee that the listers pay when they want to post car or real estate ads on OLX. It's based on a 2 slots for free logic, which means that they can list 2 ads for free, but when they want to have their third active ad on the site, they need to pay for a small fee for that.
This is just recently introduced, but I'm very excited to see the revenue development from this revenue source as well. Another example from LatAm, let's take a look at Mexico. In Mexico, we have a 100% owned business, Segundamano, and we launched the site in 2012, when actually the fifth employee of leboncoin moved over to Mexico to lead the operations there. We revamped the existing site we had in Mexico, and we started investing. Last year, we acquired a local Mexican player that was very strong in two specific regions. We consolidated their position with Segundamano and migrated their traffic. Segundamano now has solid leadership in the generalist segment, being more than two times the size of Vivanuncios, which is eBay site in Mexico.
In the car and real estate segments, Segundamano has managed to take a strong leading position in competition with local or regional LatAm vertical players. Mexico is still, though, an immature market. Despite that we have very strong competitive positions in this market, we see that the relative size of the online classified market is smaller than, for example, Brazil. We will therefore continue to invest in this market, both to develop our position, but also to educate and build and grow the market. Despite that we will continue to invest in Mexico, we are already now rolling out new monetization features. I thought I'd give you an example of that. End of last year, we launched in Mexico what we called Shops.
Shops is another way that we monetize the professional users on our site, in addition to the visibility features that I showed you from OLX. A shop is a site or a page where, for example, the Nissan car dealer that you see here can have all of his or her ads listed. It's a short description of the store. It's the logo. You can say it's like a mini website. The shops are sold on a subscription model, so users pay a monthly fee to have the shop on the site. I've showed you an example from cars, but this is not limited to certain categories and can be bought from professional users across all categories on the site. In addition to the shops, Segundamano also offers visibility features similar to the ones I showed you from OLX.
Together, that constitutes the 2 revenue sources for professional classified revenues. I'm very pleased with the uptake of these services, and we've seen a strong revenue growth in professional classified revenues also in Segundamano. Year to date in July, it was up 4 times. Now turning our focus to Asia and to Malaysia. In Malaysia, we have a site called Mudah. It's owned through a partnership, an equal partnership, with Telenor and Singapore Press Holdings. It is 1 of the 5 JVs that we have in Asia. In some of the markets, it's with Telenor and SPH, and in some of the markets, we also have Naspers as a co-owner. Mudah is, and has been for a few years, the clear market leader in all key verticals.
I think it's fair to say that in the context of emerging markets, Mudah has a more mature position. Yet the focus for Mudah is largely the same. It's about deepening the presence in the verticals and ramping up monetization, especially from pro users. One of the examples of these ongoing efforts to better serve the pro sellers, but also to create a better user experience for users searching in the pro-dominant categories, such as real estate, is what Mudah has done on the real estate segment. We've launched what we call a semi-verticalized site. It's basically a tailored-made site for properties with a special landing page and with new filters, et cetera, so that users can easily find the right property ad.
This has also allowed us to position the brand, linking it closer to the real estate vertical and promoting it to real estate agents. Results from this are positive, we've seen solid revenue growth from the vertical real estate in Mudah. This is an example from real estate, but we're taking similar steps across all the key segments. I thought I'd show you an example from Africa and Morocco. Morocco is one of 200% owned operations in Africa, the other one being Tunisia. It's another good example of successful consolidation of a market. In 2014, we were in competition with Avito site in Morocco, also called Avito. We merged, last year we acquired 100% of the combined operation.
Avito now has a very dominant position across all, across all the verticals, but it's worth noticing that Morocco is still an immature market, and the markets for real estate agents and car dealers and property developers are largely offline, and in the case of car dealers, also largely informal. Avito will have a job not only to maintain and grow its position, but also to educate the market and to grow the market. We're taking several steps to do so, rolling out tailored solutions for the pro users and introducing a lot of the monetization features that I've showed you from Mexico and Brazil. The revenue development from these sources are very promising, although from low levels still.
With a few examples, I tried to show you how, what we're doing when we see that we have a dominating or a strong position across the key verticals, how we manage then to ramp up the monetization by introducing new features. With the global product and tech supporting us, I believe that that ramp up will be even quicker going forward. Another positive effect from having the market leadership is that we managed to reduce the marketing spending. It does not mean that we kept spending entirely, but we can now focus that spending not to build market positions and traffic, but to maybe increase content or traffic in a certain region or category, or to support the rollout of the new monetization features that we are launching.
In this slide, I've chosen to show you three examples of earliest stage operations where investment levels have previously been fairly high, the trend across the portfolio is similar. We are reducing marketing spending combined with the ramped up monetization increasing revenues, this has led to a reduction of the investment levels across the portfolio. I'm very pleased to see this development. I feel that we're taking the right steps towards becoming profitable also in the emerging markets. Closing the sessions, there's three messages that I would like to leave you with. With big markets outside Europe, emerging markets constitute an important source of geographic diversification and revenue potential for the Schibsted overall portfolio. We are enjoying market leading positions in terms of traffic and content.
We've shifted our focus from building these positions to leveraging them, increasing the monetization, and ramping up new features across the portfolio. We've also managed to reduce marketing spending, and in total, this has led to a reduced investment level across the portfolio. That is the development I'm excited to see and excited to follow ahead. Thank you.
Thank you, Susanna. We do have time for some questions regarding the emerging markets. We have mics, and please remember your name and your institution. We have one question over there.
Hi, Salmaan from Hafslund Just a quick one. If you look at some of the user patterns of what users are doing on Facebook in emerging markets, and specifically Indonesia, they seem to be using it as a kind of informal classified site. You know, some people within Facebook are potentially thinking about rolling that out more aggressively. How would you compete against someone who's that big, that well-capitalized, and has such a big user base? Thanks.
Right. Yes, we are seeing that Facebook is strong, especially as you say, in the Asian side. I think our approach is adapting our product offering in these markets. We operate on different platforms in some of these markets, offering the users different functionalities to better suit the user needs and to be able to compete with Facebook groups for buying and selling. That's one way of doing it. In Malaysia, we've also rolled out a native app, mobile similar to Shpock, which is called iSell, and I believe that's another way of addressing another segment in the market and sort of expanding our total market presence similar to what Sondre explained to you about Shpock.
We have one over here. Yes.
With the marketing spending decline in Brazil and the monetization initiatives you are showing there, how far are we from the profitability in this business?
I believe that we previously said that we expect this business to be profitable in the coming years, and we remain with that. I'm not sure if we should comment more specifically, but.
No, we have said that if you take Brazil, we have said.
It could be that that will be break even situation in 2017. That's what we have said.
No, no new statements on that? No new updates?
No. It will be, as we are planning for, sometimes during 2017, it is rapidly ramping up, but no more specific on that.
Well, I think, with Jazza is that we're happy with the development in Brazil, and the positions they're taking in the marketplace.
Thank you.
We have a question over here, please.
Martin Stenshall, Danske Bank again. Could you please say something about potential ARPU levels in emerging markets, let's say, compared to what you see in, yeah, let's say Spain?
I think I've today shown you a few examples of how we are introducing monetization on the site. Naturally, the ARPU levels in this initial phase are lower. That is something that we will develop over time. As Rolf Erik showed you in the beginning, we think that there is a big upside potential, maybe especially in these markets. Currently, it's of course lower ARPU levels that we're seeing, but rapidly growing. The willingness to pay could of course be somewhat lower in the emerging markets, but the positive results we're seeing so far is encouraging.
Now it was commented about potential EBITDA break-even for Brazil maybe in 2017. Could you please put some comments on let's say, Mexico and Malaysia?
Malaysia is profitable, will continue to be so. I think we've commented on that previously. As I said, Mexico is a market which is still more immature, we will continue to invest in that market to build it.
One question over there, and then one, up here maybe. Yeah.
Hi.
One spot here.
Thomas Boleski from Fidelity. I just have one question on Brazil. You have some strong, well-capitalized competitors. What has been their reaction to the development in OLX so far?
Is that Mercado Libre you're talking about?
Sorry.
You have carsales and seed right through Webmotors and through iCarros.
Yeah.
They've done a pretty good job in some other markets. I'm just curious, you know, what has been their reaction so far?
Well, I think they're continuing to work with their car dealerships, specifically when it comes to those, and they are owned, and partly owned also by banks, for they're important lead generators. You know, I think they consider this is a very big market. You know, we have been able to increase our share of the market, especially all the consumer cars. We're seeing also that the car dealers really like our offering. I think, you know, so far it hasn't been really at the expense of this. When it comes to Mercado Libre, it's my impression that they are, you know, focusing a lot on their e-commerce offering, doing well there.
Yes, we can say that the Mercado Libre model is somewhat different to the traditional online classified models, and that we believe that those two models can quite nicely coexist in the market.
Yeah.
Okay. We have a question down in the corner, please.
Hi. It's Richard Jones from Tower House Partners. Just following on from that, when you're thinking about the long-term potential profitability in a lot of these markets, how are you thinking about that compared to what we've already seen in the established markets? Particularly I'm thinking about, it does look as though in several of them, there are a number of big international competitors who are also trying to play in all of these markets, whether it's the likes of carsales or eBay or iProperty. How are you thinking about the competitive landscape evolving in the long-term profitability?
Well, I think, if you look at Brazil, if we continue the development that we're seeing there, I'm very positive as to how that will develop because I think, you know, we've always had the strategy of building, the number one positions in traffic and volume. We're well on the way of doing that. Then I think that will, that will lead to a good economic model for us. I think, you know, Mexico is not that far in the process, but I think, things are also looking, promising there.
Thanks.
One more quick question from the audience. You will just hold your horses for now. Thank you very much. Thank you, Susanna.
Thank you.
Rolf Erik. Now, we are moving into a break, and we will invite you out here to have some refreshments and some chat with each other. Please ask management, we will be here and be available for you. If you haven't already done so, download the app, and we will meet here and start again at 10:50. You're warmly welcome. Thank you. London and online. Now, the moment you've been waiting for, we will now meet Rian Liebenberg, our CTO. You can follow his presentation here, of course, but also if you wanna find the page, it's starting on page 97. Please welcome Rian Liebenberg.
Thank you, Lena. Okay. I'm gonna follow up a little bit more detail about what we're doing specifically within product and tech. I'll try to break in some real examples so you can understand and get a sense of what we're actually doing behind the scenes. Our focus really is on building globally scalable platforms and reusable technologies. We have a number of different brands in over 30 different countries, lots of different product lines, marketplaces, publishing, growth areas, and whatnot. There is enormous amounts of commonality in terms of the technical infrastructure and capabilities that can be shared across these different products and these different brands.
Our focus really is on building up capabilities for reusability, extensibility, and crucially local adaptability, and speed up development because there are lots of competitive threats as I've heard some of the audience ask questions earlier this morning. We need to ensure that we build valuable products for our audiences and get time to market as quickly as possible. We're also, of course, crucially focused on broadening revenue streams. It's not just about building technology for the sake of building technology. Also ensure that we leverage some of the core assets that we have, crucially within within the data. Then how we can use that data across our different brands and different products. Raul will go into the details with an ecosystem strategy a little bit later today.
Let's start with the increased speed of development. Oops. Let's give that a sec. Is there a slide issue? Sorry, one second. Technical fault. Always happens with the tech guy. Do we need to reload the presentation? Just give me a thumbs up when I can go again. Okay, shall we try? Voila. Thank you. Rolf Erik mentioned earlier in his address that we are really building one global organization within product and tech. What you see up on the screen here are some pictures from event that we hosted in Barcelona just last week on Wednesday and Thursday.
Which bring together 1,500 product and tech people from all over the globe, to really sort of share ideas, to build communities around areas of expertise, and really get a common framework and a common mindset and work towards a common purpose. I have to say, you know, I've grown up in the startup community, pretty much most of my professional career, both here in Europe and the UK, as well as in the Bay Area. I've attended a lot of these, you know, tech startup events and, you know, the big conferences around the world.
What pleased me most about this particular event, and sort of the sense of deep passion and excitement is that we are right up there with the very, very best in technology, competence, capability, and shared passion and commitment. It gives me great comfort and great hope that we've got a lot of positive things to look forward to. Our organization is clearly global, and we have expertise in multiple different markets, but we do try and center around common areas of expertise.
Here on this particular slide, you see sort of what we call the sort of five core central hubs, where we try and build up centers of expertise around particular competencies, around talent availability in the market, both in terms of professional expertise as well as what the university and academic institutions can provide. Of course, it is important that we are close to our customers, so we have a very large presence in both Norway and Sweden, where the largest part of our organization exists, as well as in Spain and Barcelona. Then London and Kraków have been relatively new additions to the Schibsted family because there are unique skills in this particular market that are somewhat harder to come by, especiall y at scale in our Scandinavian operations.
we've hired aggressively, and I'm very, very happy and confident that we've managed to attract some of the world's best talent from some of the leading brands to join Schibsted in unlocking new opportunities and working towards common goals. Our focus here, and I think you've seen the slide before in Rolf Erik's presentation, is really around, you know, core platforms in publishing, in marketplaces and in advertising. To support that, data, infrastructure and common components. What are common components you might ask? Well, these are things that could be used by any product line regardless, whether it's publishing marketplaces, a growth business or whatnot.
We try to build around the capabilities of that particular feature set and ensure that it is reusable to avoid duplication of effort, to avoid duplication of resources, and also to ensure that we get the right expertise focused on solving that core problem, and then leverage the capability across all of our different product lines. In marketplaces, we are specifically focused on building great mobile first native apps in the form of Shpock, and also an internal project name called Rocket, which I'll go into a little bit more detail in a few minutes.
We're building out core capabilities in verticals, in particular jobs, real estate and cars, and ensuring that we have continuity and reusability across all of our core markets, both established as well as our emerging markets. There are a number of components that you can see at the bottom of the screen that are relevant specifically within the context of marketplaces. Features like messaging, as an example, really build a social interaction. We're not trying to build social products, but we understand and recognize that our users want to be able to discuss between buyers and sellers, between different interest groups, and building a core capability for our audiences to communicate with one another, you know, builds greater retention, builds higher session, repeat time rates, and ultimately builds better loyalty.
We've seen an enormous uplift in terms of the number of new account sign-ups, number of sessions that take place in both established as well as some of our emerging market sites that utilize some of these more social features. Rocket is a generalist mobile first platform. It's not a brand name, it's not a product name. It'll be rebranded and use the local brand names that we have within our emerging market sites today. The core principles here is a user-first experience, a mobile-first experience, and leveraging the advances of technology that are available out in the industry as a whole, in particular things like artificial intelligence. We've got image recognition, you've got machine learning, you've got natural language processing, et cetera, et cetera.
What I'm gonna show you here, on the left side of your screen, is just a quick demo video walkthrough of the recent product we built. We're testing it as we speak, out in Greece, with 2,000 users as our beta test audience, and we plan to roll it out fairly aggressively to our emerging market sites throughout the second half of this year and throughout 2017. You can see, the experience here is quite different from traditional classified sites and marketplaces. You no longer have a sort of a static input output style experience where you've got to put in an email address and password, but it's more conversational UI. This is a sign up flow for using phone numbers and an SMS verification code.
What we're doing with the conversational bots, as we call them, and as they're commonly known in the industry, is really build sort of more a sticky personalized experience whereby we can adapt the flow to ensure that the user gets the right type of experience and engages in our product in an intimate and meaningful way. The key features that we're launching in the initial beta are around conversational bots, sign-up flows and rethinking that entire paradigm. We're looking at the ad insertion flow and really core focus on imagery and minimizing the amount of text. We're using image recognition capabilities there. Of course, also the conversational piece between buyers and sellers, and ultimately between different interest groups.
A quick recap of that is, of course, new technologies opens up new capabilities for us whereby we can drive better user engagement, higher volume of ad insertions, and of course, also more transactions and bring a delightful user experience. In broadening our revenue streams, the ad landscape is an extremely fragmented environment, right? This is a stock standard image from the internet. It's not something I spent hours creating myself. There are a lot of intermediaries in the supply chain between the buy side, which is the ad buying, the agencies, and direct advertisers through to the sell side, which are traditionally the media companies and the publishers. Of course, with all these intermediaries that exist in the supply chain, there's significant margin erosion that takes place.
The sell side and the people with the inventory are the ones that have suffered most. As a consequence of that problem, we're also seeing an industry trend unfold, which is a very, very rapid and rampant rise of programmatic ad buying or RTB as it's sometimes called. This is really algorithms making decisions in real time between a campaign and an inventory availability and delivering that ad in sub 200 milliseconds. It's wonderful technology, but it's not necessarily delivering, you know, the precise right ad in the right spot in the right experience. We are very, very mindful of some of these technological shifts that are happening out in the industry, and ad revenue and display ad revenue, of course, makes up, you know, a fairly sizable chunk of our overall revenue and income line.
We've adapted our strategy to ensure that we consolidate on platforms. Again, the platform strategy plays out even within advertising. We've partnered up with AppNexus, which is the world's largest independent ad tech company. There is no conflict of interest, i.e., they have 0 media buying as part of their business, unlike the equivalent Google with DoubleClick, who will sell you wonderful technology, but then also compete for the advertising and the media buying side. Data makes up a huge part of ensuring that we can deliver the right ad to the right user at the right time on the right device in the right context. What we're trying to do here is we're trying to create a crucial balance between scalability and local adaptability.
We've got extremely good positions in especially our mature markets, where we're able to have a direct sales channel where we can do premium buying and guaranteed buying. What that does is it preserves the value of our inventory in the markets to our advertisers. At the same time, we can also leverage the programmatic buy side, which ensures that we can get maximum scale and reach, and ensure that especially in the smaller parts of our sites where we've got plenty inventory positions, that we can backfill that through open ad exchanges. We're getting a very healthy balance and mix between ensuring that we've got bid inventory at high price points and also the global reach to ensure that we can get maximum validity out of the market.
In particular, you know, our inventory remains of high quality because of these six factors. You know, we've got great coverage. In this particular example in Norway, we reach the Norwegian Internet populations, something like 80% of that entire population almost every single day. We've got premium positions. We've got very, very well-recognized and trusted brands. We've got great positions for the right campaign to be viewed, if you think about the frequency of news or the interest and intent that is driven within our marketplaces. We can also curate the inventory and the positions in such a way that we can reduce fraud and use our data in interesting and unique ways to ensure we get maximum relevancy both for the advertising and maximum relevancy and experience for our end users.
AppNexus is something that we're focused on, rolling out very aggressively across all of our key markets. We're already live in Norway, we're already live in France, and we just went live in Finland last week. For the remainder of this year, we will go live in Mexico and in Spain, and then early next year in Sweden. You can see the platform and the common technology foundations come into play in all aspects of our offerings, including in advertising. Another part of unlocking revenue streams is really if you think about our brands and our positions are quintessentially local, right? We have great local strength in the slide I just showed. You know, Norway reaches something like 80% of the internet population every single day.
We say to yourself, well, if we think about the local ad market, right, the digital ad market, that is a very, very rapidly growing industry. It's moving from, you know, offline, it's moving away from flyers, all going online in a very, very rapid shift in the industry at large. If you look at this particular example in France, it's a EUR 3 billion market as of 2015. You know, with huge positions in lots of re-relevant and overlapping categories in the marketplaces that we sell.
We asked ourselves the question, what if we provided a very, very simple SME self-serve ad offering where they can create a campaign, they can reach their audiences in a very, very locally targeted demographic or even on a French national demographic, if you stick with the French example. What sort of new revenue opportunities can we unlock there, firstly with our own positions and ultimately within the overall display ad industry. Here is a quick example of a product that we built and launched in beta form earlier this year in France, and we're testing out various concepts with the French advertising market. We also did a very soft launch just before the summer break in Norway on FINN.no, and we're constantly improving the several product.
Let's take a quick walk through. This is in French, I will not translate, but hopefully you can follow. Very, very simple. Local advertiser here is a garage. He can put up his website, he can give it a description, and he can pick the relevant imagery that he wants to add in his particular campaign. He can then also select, you know, if it's a specific category that he wants to list in within leboncoin in this particular example, and what sort of reach he wants, either French national or hyper targeted within a particular domain. Remember, some of these people are, you know, butchers, barbers, bakers, you know, very, very local businesses. Can set the campaign value. You know, it's a cost per click type revenue mechanism right now.
Can add payment information, and we support all major payment forms in the local markets that we operate in. We're obfuscating credit card for obvious reasons. In 4 simple steps, you have an ad campaign that is launched. It is as simple as that. The core focus here is on simplicity, not trying to make it too complicated for local retailers and merchants to be able to create a campaign and reach the right audience. That is a great example of how we're sort of utilizing and leveraging our positions and creating new forms of revenue. Secondly, we're also like working on unlocking the value of our data. We have this product called the Audience Targeting Engine. In the ad industry, it is called a DMP.
The reason why we don't call it a DMP but an ATE is because it's all about using data and targeting content to that user in the right form, whether it be device, location, interest, you know, whatever the parameters might be. We're starting with display advertising because it's somewhat obvious. Ultimately, we want to generalize this technology to be able to create other forms of content targeting, whether it be news, classified ads and whatnot. It was built by our team here in London. Again, let's walk through a very, very quick demo. This is not the sexiest user interface because this is not meant for the general public consumption audience, but rather for our ad operations people to create ad segments.
In this particular example, what we'll do is we'll create a segment for Bergen, which is in Norway. We'll target males 46-55, and it real-time calculates in the bottom right-hand corner the size of the targeted segment. You can see the area that it'll target. We'll switch into AppNexus and their booking screen. We'll add targeting parameters. You can do different devices and whatnot. We'll add Bergen, the segment that we've just created, to a campaign and do real-time targeting. This is all available in sub-10 milliseconds. As soon as that targeting segment has been added to a campaign, it is live. We're currently running this in Norway, and we've seen a 7, 8x increase in geotargeting and age and gender targeting, which are great parameters that really improve relevancy.
We're launching ATE alongside the AppNexus deployment that I talked about earlier in markets like France and Finland, Mexico, Spain and Sweden and whatnot, over the next couple of months. Our data plays, you know, a strong reinforcing cycle. If you think about our products, we're capturing a lot of data, behavioral data, user audience data, and understanding really which parts of our products our users engage with. If we build in artificial intelligence, whether it be machine learning, whether it be image recognition, whether it be natural language processing or other concepts, we can then use what we're capturing around sort of our audience behavior back into our product, improve our products, capture more data, and unlock new profits. It's as simple as that, right?
We're busy working on, you know, a fairly substantial investment in ensuring that we capture and extract as much value as possible out of our data and unlock it in various parts of our product offering. As an example, we have a central store now, which is called the Image Store. It's about 350 million unique images. We're adding about 100 million new unique images every single month. We're using this unique dataset to train our image recognition models on. Why is image recognition important? Well, if you think about a mobile user experience, somebody wants to post a new ad, the last thing you want to do is go through a convoluted ad insertion flow, where they've got to add descriptions and details, pricing, and all sorts of other things.
If we can understand what is in the object, if it's a bicycle, we can suggest the right categories, and we can improve the overall relevancy of the ad, and we could maybe potentially even understand the relationship between that particular object or that ad to other objects in our classified or marketplace sites and do even some price prediction. All of these techniques we're leveraging and utilizing to improve our overall product experience. To recap, speed of development is absolutely important, not only for our survival, but also for us to thrive and build new great experiences across all of our different product channels.
We're constantly unlocking and seeking to open up new revenue streams, and we leverage the importance, and we understand the value of our data, and we're already seeing this, live in some of our real products that we've built over the last couple of months. We'll continue to accelerate the pace of, both development and deployment across all of our products. Thank you. I'll take some questions now, I think.
Yes. Now we'll open up for some questions. We have questions in the back.
Just a question on the impact of AppNexus. I think you said it was rolled out in France and Norway. Just curious what the CPM impact has been. Second question is just generally on display advertising, especially in the context of online classifieds. We've seen other players, as traffic moves on to apps, de-emphasize display revenue, actually. Can you just talk about the trade-off between continuing to pursue display ad revenue through the self-serve model you mentioned, vis-à-vis continuing to grow consumer engagement and perhaps monetizing in other ways and not through display?
To take the first question, around the relative impact of CPM, I believe it's. I don't have exact numbers in front of me right now, but I believe it's held true and actually increased slightly. Of course, with any major migration, there are, you know, slight little tweaks and hiccups that occur as. We're not immune to that. We've seen some, you know, softening of the revenues during the transition, I think we're through that now. We've actually seen, you know, post-migration stabilization, a healthy improvement on both CPM margins, as well as of our ad revenue in the markets that we've launched. There is, of course, still plenty opportunity for improvement.
There are things like yield optimization tools that we're busy working on collectively with AppNexus to introduce into our markets, so we can do better forecasting and understand how we can maximize the CPM yield over time. That's an ongoing an ongoing evolution. To come to your second question regarding the softening of display advertising on mobile. I think we have seen in certain markets where we've gone with a responsive mobile or a native mobile experience that, of course, you know, classic formats like banner ads and whatnot, don't transfer onto that form factor. Of course, you know, that revenue does disappear.
It's up to us to ensure that we have the right formats, and we build in the right overall experience as a native format within activity streams and whatnot, to ensure relevancy and validity. What we've seen is, you know, one ad format decrease in terms of popularity and of course also in terms of revenue lines, but other ad formats improve a great deal. I think it's again, it's a case of, you know, leveraging the strength of our brands, ensuring that we've got the right formats and the right overall experience for both advertisers and ultimately also users. You certainly don't want your entire activity stream to be made up purely only of display ads.
Thank you. We have questions here in the front. We have two questions.
Hi. Nadim Belakhdim from Goldman Sachs. I want to ask you on this Rocket engine. How do you think this changes the vertical experience? Or it is primarily designed for the goods classifieds? Or you'll be also transform the vertical experience like in cars, real estate, and jobs as well?
We're starting with Rocket. We're starting out with purely focusing on the generalist experience and the audience experience. That is our core focus right now, which is why we're targeting primarily emerging markets, which is predominantly generalist marketplace experiences. In parallel, we're busy working on understanding what are the commonalities in the verticals that could be reused with great speed and simplicity across the different markets. Building that out independently, but of course, ensuring that we can bolt it on to the Rocket experience so that you have a ready-made platform that you can launch either new verticals, new experiences or new forms of revenue and monetization over time.
And-
We're effectively think about it as a Lego block approach.
Is it correct to assume that if you see that those 2,000 beta tests are successful, you will scale further and further, and you mentioned 2017, you will roll this out across your operations?
That is the intention. A lot of our emerging marketplace sites run their own independent sites, right? Their own data, their own technology, their own platform, their own teams. When we understand that there is a new opportunity to create a new form of monetization and new revenue stream, we have to kind of duplicate that across a lot of the different sites, right? That reduces, of course, efficiency. There's a lot of duplication of effort, time to market is impacted, et cetera. It's kind of obvious that we need to simplify our time to market and our launch strategies and philosophies.
What Rocket gives us is a single platform for us to simply launch new concepts and products, stuff that we build globally with a global audience in mind, or things that we've discovered in a local market, let's say for example, in Mexico, that works particularly well for that audience. If we understand that there is a new form of revenue or a new mechanism that can really engage users, how can we then make that part of the core platform and make it quickly available to other markets across the globe? It's a little bit, you know, going both ways.
It's not just a central push out to local markets, it's also understanding how our users interact, you know, right from the first 2,000 beta users, how they react and respond to our products, and how can we then bake that in and constantly improve.
Uh, will-
It becomes a virtual cycle.
Will it replace also the engines of, like France, Italy, Spain?
Yes, over time, but, you know, these are big businesses that make substantial revenues. I think we have to be somewhat cautious and careful about how we'd go and disrupt those businesses. Of course, you know, ultimately, a lot of the core revenues that exist in our established markets could be readily applied in our emerging markets. How can we leverage that experience and expertise and very quickly ensure that, you know, some of our newer markets and newer areas can quickly benefit? The concept remains the same. The technological implementation might be a little bit more awkward for us to to change that quickly. I don't expect us to make changes in 2017, just for the record.
Okay. One more question over here.
Yes. Henriette Trond, Arctic Securities.
Hi.
I understand that you will centralize all product and tech costs this year and reduce some employee costs next year. Related to this, do you have any thoughts about cost savings for this next year?
Our core focus is really on reducing and removing duplication of effort. If we can have 1,400 people contribute to product development and all contribute to new feature development, new forms of revenue, all of Schibsted benefits. Our core philosophy and focus here is not about how much we can reduce costs, really how can we remove duplication of effort and get everybody contributing to new things. That's really what we're focused on right now.
Thank you. Do we have another question? Hi, it's Markus Diebel
Hi. Sorry.
Just on your self-service advertising and, you know, the large opportunity for the local market. I struggle to see how do these get to know the product. I mean, does it mean you have a large sales force that you need to implement? I guess cost per click are things that are unheard of for these kind of customers so far. How do you actually make the product known?
I mean, we have well-established sales forces in our markets already. I think that's one of the key benefits that we have over many other businesses is that we have, you know, local sales forces and local marketing teams that really understand the market. It's about, you know, helping our local sales force educate the market, you know, through marketing campaigns and also through, you know, assisted sales process whereby they can start out with small campaigns in a self-serve mechanism that's meant to be as simple as possible and not confusing. Then, of course, once we build confidence and trust in terms of value add, that it would get more assistance and more support from our sales forces for, you know, bigger campaigns, national campaigns and whatnot.
There's a migration path that we hope will play out, you know, from people trying out with, relatively low budgets and of course increasing their spend with us over time.
You think you can basically achieve that with the current sales force will just sell more rather than increase the sales force?
Yes. I believe we can do that, and ultimately we can generate a lot more revenue per sales employee, and that's the objective.
Okay. I think we have time for one more question. Who will grab the opportunity? Yes, down there.
Hi, it's Catherine from Citi. Obviously you're talking about using an awful lot of data and personal data. Are there any sort of regulatory on the privacy side and data protection side sort of challenges that you face in your sort of development plan going forward?
Yeah, I mean, as we all know, the EU have, you know, a sort of a leading position in terms of thinking about end user privacy, and we welcome that. Some of you may even be aware of that in May 2018, there are new data regulation policies being implemented, which are a lot more enforceable and a lot more restrictive on businesses operating in the EU. Things like right to be forgotten, which will be popularized in regulation and policy. We're very mindful that, you know, we are utilizing our audience's data in order to improve our product, to give them a better experience, and that we have to respect their privacy and their data.
We have a very active privacy initiative, which will be a core priority for us throughout 2017 to ensure that we build accessible and simple to understand dashboards and capabilities for people to look at what data we capture of them and for them to opt in and opt out of different services. It's not so much about us trying to comply with regulation, but actually embracing that regulation and thinking about how can we drive product improvements and really sort of engage with our users and build ultimately trust. I think that's really what it's all about.
Oh, thank you so much, Rian.
Thank you.
Now we will move into the strategy around our ecosystems. Here to speak about that is Raul Grünthal, who will speak of the long-term value creation in our ecosystems. After that, he will also move into publishing and all the exciting things that are going on in publishing. Raul is the EVP of Schibsted Sweden.
Thank you, Lena. Yes, I will start with the ecosystem and then quite briefly give some comments about our publishing strategy. This morning our Chairman, Ole Jacob, said it was great to be here, and I really feel the same. There are some new faces and there are also some faces from some years ago. There are quite a few people who have really followed Schibsted for quite a few years. If we go back to the time when you started looking at Schibsted and perhaps also investing in Schibsted, it was really a very different kind of company. At that time, it was basically, I would say, a holding company, owning shares, owning other media companies, with not very high level synergies between the companies.
That has gradually changed. I would say the start of this changing was when we started acquiring new companies, especially on the Swedish markets. It started with Blocket being acquired, that company was heavily promoted on Aftonbladet. We saw that if we interacted between these companies, these assets, a value was created. Later on, we did the same when we acquired Lendo. Lendo, the marketplace for consumer loans, was heavily promoted on Blocket, actually. The same went with Prisjakt, the price comparison and pre-shopping sites. It was heavily promoted on Blocket and also on Aftonbladet. We saw that putting these companies together could really create value. That was the start of the ecosystem.
As you can hear when Rian is talking, this has really developed the last years, and today it is something different. I'm going to give you quite a market flavor to what the ecosystem is today. What is our aim with the ecosystem? First of all, it's to continue where we already have a strong track record for the last years. It's to build new winners. It's to build these new digital companies that will acquire new markets for us. We will continue doing so on the Scandinavian market, but the change now is perhaps that we are going to do it a little bit more aggressively on the markets outside of Scandinavia as well.
The second thing is, we haven't touched upon that, about protecting and also taking new market shares on the advertising markets, thanks to the ecosystem. The third one is to build better product, to have a better product development, thanks to the ecosystem strategy. What is an ecosystem? Well, the definition is quite easy, and it will not change over time. It's a network of interconnected digital products that reinforce one another. That's the simple definition. The how is changing all the time. As I told you, it started with, well, how to say it? Well, with the traffic sharing, with Aftonbladet, with Blocket, helping smaller sites with traffic, and building new big companies out of them. The kind of ecosystem we are building now is based on other things.
It's mainly based on shared platforms and shared data. That's the change that we are going through. What kind of contributions do different companies give to this ecosystem? Let's start looking at the marketplaces. They have high reach. They give us very good intent data, and they're also good at driving logged in. Historically, they have been very good conversion engines also. For instance, when Blocket is helping Lendo, it's all about conversion. What about the media assets? They also have a high reach, and they also have very high frequency, and that's a nice asset. They also give context. Usually, the media houses are great for brand building and the marketplaces are great for conversion.
I also want to point out that many of the new companies within the growth business area are also contributing to the ecosystem in a very important way. That will become even more important when it's more about data than about traffic. Some of these products don't have a huge traffic, but they create great data. Just to give you one example, Prisjakt, the pre-shopping sites. If I go into Prisjakt, so for instance, look at the bicycle or a BBQ or a video camera, the probability that I will actually buy a bicycle or a video camera is very, very high. That obviously means that this is very valuable data for advertisers, but also for our other products. This is data that can be used within the ecosystem.
It's not only the media houses, it's not only the marketplaces, but it's also our growth companies contributing to this ecosystem. What is the ecosystem doing? Well, I would say that the ecosystem 1.0 is creating new digital winners. That was what I was talking about. The second level is to achieve a stronger position on the ad market. The third level is about product enhancement. Okay, let's talk about the dimension of creating winners. Rolv Erik showed you this before, and it's about trying to explain, okay, where is the business area of growth? Well, it is in the intersection of marketplaces and media houses. It's companies that have been created thanks to this first level of ecosystem strategy that I explained.
We have been investing, first in Sweden, but the last years also in Norway, in these kind of companies. Among these companies, of course, you have some failures, but you have also a very high % of successes. It's important to point out that most of the time when we make these kind of investments, it's not with a thought of a financial investor. It's really an industrial perspective we have. We want to find companies that can long-term contribute to the ecosystem, like I explained with Prisjakt. Today, this is already, though it's still growing, of course, a very important business area, at least in Sweden. It is becoming important in Norway as well. I would say it as important as publishing, for instance.
It has a turnover of a little bit more than 1 billion NOK, and a margin a little bit above 20% right now. With good growth, you can imagine that if this continue, this will become quite important. Of course, the big potential lies within an internationalization of this kind of companies. This is a division of four areas within the business area. Of course, we have digital marketplaces, and if they are successful and maturing, they are going into the business area of marketplaces, of course. We have, on the other part, internet consumer services. For the moment being, these are not companies that we are looking very much on scaling internationally. In the middle, you have first personal finance, which is by far today the largest part of growth.
These are companies that we hope will be able to scale abroad or internationally, and we have already started doing that. The most important of these companies is Lendo. Compricer is also quite large, but Lendo is the most important of them. Lendo has been launched in Norway with great success, and now also in Finland. It's still early days. Together, we are helping 40 banks in order to reach the customers in Scandinavia. We also have the e-commerce related companies, and the one that we really think is a scalable among them is Prisjakt, or in England it's called PriceSpy. It's not only price comparison, it's free shopping, I would say. It's all the things that you want to know about a product before buying it.
I think that if we look ahead, I think that we will have quite interesting years ahead with the internationalization of these companies. Where we will do it, what will we launch? We'll see. We have a plan, what just as a teaser, I would like to mention that of course, we will look at, okay, what kind of market opportunities we have in different markets, which products are scalable and so on. One thing that is really interesting to point out is that the synergies between the marketplaces and the financial services companies are very large, generally. As we could see in Sweden between Blocket and Lendo, also Blocket and Compricer, and as we can see in Norway between FINN.no and Lendo. That was the first level of ecosystem.
The second level is to achieve an even stronger position on the advertising market. As you all know, the good news on the advertising market is that we are really on a sweet spot. We are the Scandinavian leader of the online advertising markets, and that's of course, a great position. The challenge is that there are not only Scandinavians on the Scandinavian advertising market, there are also some other guys around there. The market is really changing, as you know. This is the same picture as Rian just showed you. Actually, it was I who did it. No, just joking. It shows from a market perspective that you really have some trouble if you're just having this position. Just to go out on the market and trying to sell inventory is not good enough anymore.
You have to be in control of the platform, you have to be in control of the data if you want to be successful. That's really what we are trying to achieve right now. What do we do in order to achieve that? Well, before all the things that Rian told us about, may happen, we must start with organizing us in the right way. That's what we are doing right now and what we have done during 2016. Both in Norway and in Sweden, we are pooling our sales forces into one organization instead of being organized in silos. That's a change. That's a move you have to do if you want to be successful in this new kind of markets. So far, so good.
This organizational change in itself has been very well received on the markets. We must do all the other things. The first thing, of course, is to implement AppNexus. As Rian told us, we have done it in France, we have done it in Norway, we will do it in Sweden now. We will build our components around this platform. The third level of this platform strategy is probably also to invite external partners. That could be media agencies, that could be direct buyers, and probably, hopefully, also publishing partners. That's our aim. It's not now, but it's, it's something we really want to do because we think that will even create a stronger ecosystem.
Rian showed demos of the components, of two of the components that we have already created, the self-serve and also the Audience Targeting Engine. These are extremely important products. The good news is that if we succeed in building that kind of products, we will thereby have a platform that is able of competing with the best platforms in the world, we also have something else that the other guys do not have, and that's the context of our sites. I think that it's important in this market not to forget that the quality of the brands of the sites and the context that are within the sites is still very, very important in order to get the right CPM. Okay.
The last level of the ecosystem strategy is to create better products. It's product development. In order to really get the right data out of the users, it's important to get people logged in. As I told you before, our marketplaces are a great engine to make people log in. That's what we are doing right now, and we are doing it, you know, on our own, our own single sign-on, and with that's SPID. Today, more or less all the important sites in Scandinavia have SPID. What our aim, of course, is to get data from our users. With thanks to that data, we will, in different ways, be able to build better products.
These products will give us even better engagement from the users, and that will give better data and, well, you get the story. That will create better product development. Another perspective of that is to look on the user journey. Rolf-Erik told us about this morning about that the car vertical. We have a very strong position in Sweden on the car vertical, but we still think that we can get higher ARPU. Of course, that ARPU can be created within the marketplace, but also the data that we get out of this can be used in other ways. Look, for instance, at a normal consumer who is going to buy a car. First we start looking at different kind of cars on Blocket. You make the research.
In the newspapers, you start looking at, okay, how can I finance this? On Compricer, on Lendo. You will probably need insurance. On Compricer, you can get an insurance, and so on. We all have all these assets that composes the user journey, but we don't today have the data and the platform to make these different sites to make one combined product for the user. That we think is what we will be able to do in the future. Basically, what is the ecosystem strategy all about? Well, it's about first, to continue building great companies, that we have been doing in the past, but now also to export them in a more aggressive way abroad.
Secondly, is to protect our advertising market, but also to gain new market shares on the advertising market. The third level is to get greater product development. That's basically what it's all about. That was about the ecosystem. Now I would like to have the publishing part. I will take the questions afterwards. I will not repeat Rolf-Erik's presentation once again, even though it was excellent. That's Trump's. Even worse. Just tell me when you're ready. I can assure you that the media houses are still there. It's just the presentation that there is...
Oh, we're too late.
Right.
You can talk about everything, right? No, I think we'll just-- while our technical staff is working on this, we should take the opportunity and ask Raul about the ecosystem strategy. If you have questions regarding what he just presented on the ecosystem strategy. Please. Yes, we have a question over here.
Spencer Adair from Baillie Gifford. Given the importance of content as a differentiator, does that suggest the era for cost-cutting in traditional media is coming to an end, that we should be investing there to have a competitive differentiation?
Yes, I mean, good question. I will speak about publishing later on, but, the answer is yes and no. I mean, we still have to manage the decline of prints. That means we still have lots of cost-cutting to do. We also have some very encouraging trends right now, which tells us that, okay, it could be probably a good investment, invest in publishing as well. We have to do both. We have to invest in the platforms and, later on in new products as well. Actually we are starting to do that.
It's, I would say that we are already in really in a cost-cutting and investment mood at the same time, which is of course quite tough from a management point of view. It's still something you need to do because, no, you can't stop making the cost cuts, unfortunately. You still have at least, I would say three, four years ahead of us with cost cuts still.
Okay, I think that's a wonderful bridge to your presentation.
Yes. That was basically what I was going to say. It was, thank you. Yes, it's really what it's all about. It's about managing the decline of print. As you know, we have since long really dared to talk about the decline of print. Our ambition is not to stop the decline of print, it's to manage it. Also, of course, to be successful in the new digital area and create the products that will be successful in the digital area. What are the main messages in publishing? Well, the first one is that we are actually managing this quite well for the moment. We have stable margins in publishing. That's of course is in many ways, thanks to cost cuts, but also to price increases.
One of the encouraging trends I talked about was the user payment. User payment is growing, and that's really a fantastic thing if you want to keep profitable news sites in the future. If it's only one thing you should remember from this presentation, it's really about user payment taking off. In order to build this great products, we need the platforms. Because one challenge historically has been that most of these publishing products have not been scalable. We must build scalable products in order to be successful. We are managing this in a, in a quite a good way, I would say. In Norway, it's a very challenging market. Of course, since several years, we have the decline of print.
Now this year, we also have a very tough online advertising market. In spite of this, the margins are stable. That's mainly thanks to cost cuts, as I said before, but also price increase. In Norway, it's very clear that user payment is growing. It's growing for VG, and it's growing for the subscription papers. Sweden is doing well right now. It's a little bit the same situation in Norway, but it's a better situation for the online advertising market. Print is as bad, and we also can see the positive trends, especially within user payments. We have a not only stable margin, but also stable top line. The profits are actually stable. So what kind of user behaviors do we have right now?
One interesting trend is that news sites, or the consumers, I would say, expect new services to be personalized as well now. Historically, news sites have been one size fits all, but now there are coming a larger demand for personalized news sites, that's a very interesting trend. Of course, since a few years, our main competitors are not anymore the old, legacy, media companies, but more aggregators and social medias. I will show you afterwards, we also have our own aggregator, Omni, which is a new and quite successful product. Video is becoming more and more important. Rolf Erik mentioned it before. Once again, the big trend of this year is that user payment is growing, and it's growing at a high pace.
Advertising market is changing as well. I talked about it when talking about ecosystem, and Rian talked about it as well. What I really want to have you as a takeaway is that even though this programmatic trend is taking over to a large extent, there is also, I would say, contradictory trend to that. The fact that we have this abundance of inventory on the net and this great possibilities of segmentation have also created a situation where context and branding is actually extremely important. We can see that for instance, on the development of the CPM of a high-end brand as Svenska Dagbladet, which is actually positive right now. Of course, we also have to deal with the global players taking market shares all the time.
This is to give you an idea about how important is the user payment coming in as important source of revenue. Well, I would say that for the evening papers, Aftonbladet and VG, who are, as you know, enormous on their markets and have a great source of income from advertisingI would say it's an important add-on revenue. It will never be as important as the, as the ad revenues, but it's, it's new and nice revenue. For the morning papers, Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden and the four morning papers in Norway, it could actually be extremely important. If the trend that we see right now continues, actually, the user payment could be as important as advertising in a few years. That's really game-changer for these sites.
It's also really good because it gives hope for this kind of niche sites. One other very positive thing is that not only this is giving us new money, but it's also giving a transition into a new and younger user base. If you look at this slide, you have to the right from your side, you have people, the age of people, reading and subscribing to a Norwegian morning paper in print every day. The age of this kind of readers is 69, 71. Somewhere there you have the medium level. You have the weekend readers. That means the people who get print paper during the weekend and digital paper during the whole week. There, the age is around 45.
You have the 100% digital readers who get no print paper whatsoever but are subscribed to the print newspaper. There, the age of the normal reader is around 30 year. Of course, if this is a lifetime relation, that's really good news because the lifetime value of the people to the left are quite high. It's a really, once again, it's a real game-changer because from a situation where we had a very aging user base, now it's becoming younger again, and that's good news. At the same time, as we said before, we must keep tight cost control because don't forget that the main trend, looking at the figures the coming year, is still the decline of print. We are doing that in different kind of ways.
One way is optimizing, optimizing print and distribution. That's one massive way of making cost cuts. The other way is synergies within our group. The third way, of course, is lower headcounts. We have to do all three. We have plans both in Sweden and Norway of how to manage this lower cost base in the future. I will not go into depth about what Rian just told about, but just to emphasize that this is extremely important, and this is our future, to build the platforms in order to build scalable publishing products. That's really the future. Of course, it's to enhance and make better the existing, the established products that we have on the Norwegian and Swedish market. It is also actually to build new products.
Just to give you the first example of a new product that we have is Omni. It's basically a news aggregator. It's a one-stop shopping for news junkies, I would say. People that are extremely interested in news, they can just have one app, and they will get all the news in that app. We launched it in Sweden end of 2013, and it's already one of the leading news apps in Sweden. It's, it's quite close to profitability. Not big figures, but still a very encouraging development. The big thing with this is perhaps not the product in itself, it's that it's built on the platform and therefore scalable. We can do the same kind of product within verticals in other geographies and in many different ways.
Here you have an example actually of a scalable publishing product. What are we doing? Well, first of all, we are still doing well. Margins are stable. We are still working with cost reduction, and we have to. Good news is that user payment is growing, and we are trying to use our platforms in order to build the scalable products of the future. Thank you.
Thank you, Raul. I think we have time for questions.
Classified's coming back all the time, isn't it?
Yeah. Can't stop them. Okay. No questions at this stage? Okay. Oh, there's a question. Sorry.
Hi, it's Thomas Bolinski from Fidelity. I'm just curious, how do you envisage your editorial teams, your journalism, your journalists will change over the next couple of years with what seems, the changing business model?
Well, I mean, the question is how we, how we inform about or how we.
I'm more curious about I heard some of your global peers talking about a bit more focus on really high content, really high-quality journalism. Would you agree with that, or are you happy with where you are at the moment?
Yes. I would say that it's extremely important to get all the knowledge of the group integrated to, the work of the editorial staff. For them to understand our strategies in the right way. For instance, if you look at the morning papers compared to the evening papers, it's obvious that Aftonbladet and VG in the future will be mainly financed by advertising, even though user payment is a nice add-on. Of course, it's very much about building traffic, lots of page views. That's really the thing that we've got to do with our editorial content.
If you look on the morning papers, Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden, Aftenposten in Norway, then of course, if you want people to pay that kind of sums that we are talking about, we are talking about more than NOK 2,000 a year, then you must have premium content. That's really what it's all about. Basically, I think that's what people are saying is true, that people are still not really wanting to pay for news. They are wanting to pay for premium content. It's really about creating premium content for that kind of newspaper. The thing is that the differentiation between different kind of media products, I think will be bigger in the future.
In the past, you had, more or less the same kind of product being produced at many different places. That will not be the case in the future. You must have a much clearer product strategy.
Yes, we have one more question down there.
How much of the traffic comes from Facebook for the media houses? What's your opinion on instant articles? It would seem that Facebook is trying to move upstream and, you know, get you to share some of the revenue.
Yeah. We don't get the exact figures. Compared to most of the newspapers in the world or the news sites in the world, it's a very small figure. Most of these this traffic is direct traffic. That's really where Scandinavian newspapers or news sites are so different from news sites in most of the world. That's also the explanation of, if you remember the slide shown by Rolf Erik, which showed that in page views, Aftonbladet has more or less the same traffic as brands as Wall Street Journal or New York Times. How is that possible in a small country like Sweden to have the same kind of traffic as large American brands? Well, it's thanks to the direct traffic.
You have a habit within Swedish and Norwegian users to get in every morning to look at your newspaper, every day at lunch, every time you take a coffee, several days a week, several times a day. You can only get that if you have the direct traffic. Basically, we are not interested in having Facebook or any other platform as a distribution channel. We could of course use it sometimes as a marketing tool. That's possible. We think that if publishers lose the control of the platform that they are published on, it's really the end of the game. You must control the platform. If you don't do that, you're lost.
Okay. One more.
Hi, Richard James at Towerhouse. You talked a lot in your presentation about how margins have been stable, and it's all been going very well. The statement this morning referred to near to medium term pressure on the margins. Just wondering if you could expand on that a little bit, what might be changing around that and how you see that evolving?
I mean, it is a challenging market. We can see right now for the morning papers in Norway, it is an even more challenging market. I think it's really about the pace of the downturn of print. If we have that as a manageable pace, I think that we will be able to keep the margins at a good level, at least. If the decrease is very, very rapid, of course it's quite difficult to meet up with the cost savings. It's a little bit about, it's difficult to say exactly how the market will develop the coming years.
I, at least our ambition is to keep the same kind of margin levels that we have right now.
Okay. Thank you very much, Raul.
Thank you.
I might also add that the editorial staff in Schibsted is very enthusiastic about the publishing platform and all the next generation products that we now have. With that, I'd like to introduce Trond Berger, our CFO, talk about strong financials enabling continued growth.
Thank you, Lena. It's a pleasure to be here. So far, 2016 has been a good year. You know that Schibsted, we need solid financial in order to deliver on our goals going forward. We, as Rolf Erik also said, is that we maintain the guidance with the top-line growth of 15%-20% for the classifieds. Also long-term allocation is really important for us. This combined with disciplined capital allocation should then give good prospects for the future. This slide you have seen several times already, I'll try to say something about it even if you have seen it. Again, I think that we have delivered on what we have promised to the market.
Now, we maintain, as I said, the 15%-20% top-line growth. We have delivered 30% growth rate on EBITDA. I've been with Schibsted for quite many years. I would say that we have a tradition of being long-term industrial player, invest also even if the financial market doesn't really appreciate that just for the time being. That was the case, at least in the year 2004-2008. I think we have seen a lot of return from that kind of investments, being long-term thinker. We believe that's the right way to build gradually, stone by stone.
If you look at the revenue per user, Rolv Erik elaborated on the ARPU levels in some categories in cars and real estate in certain markets. You clearly, Scandinavia is the most mature assets that we have. The revenue per user there is high, particularly high in Norway, of course. I would say that there is great potential in many of the markets that we have, spread out in Europe, first of all, as the slide shows. If you look at the demographics of France and Sweden, they're quite similar, and also same type of so to say, internet penetration. We think this is a good opportunity to further monetize on the position that we have.
We, in the statement this morning, said that we had a slowdown in Spain in Q3, around 8%-10% growth rate going down from first half. It's first of all due to the macro situation. I think it's fair to say that we expect some improvement in Q4 as it looks now. The market is a little bit uncertain. Spain is also well positioned going forward, as Sondre explained about. If we look at where do we have spent the money over the last years, you see that we have allocated most to, of course, online classifieds, a small portion to growth.
Also within the online classifieds, we have really allocated to first of all, organic growth, and also some into verticals and some into native apps. All in all, it is really an organic, steady way of investment, also doing some bolt-on acquisition. That's the way we have built the business. We have value creation through investments in online classifieds. We have, if you look at the period 2011-2015, we have invested NOK 4 billion. As a result of that, we have then 18 leading traffic positions, which is quite impressive. Also this gives reason for future revenue streams, going further into the value chain in the classifieds. It gives the opportunity to develop new market position, it could also be potential new markets.
I would say that we have over the many years we have invested in the classifieds, we have a few failures, not many, but it's like in Australia, like in Greece, and a couple of other countries have been lagging. Most other investments we have done in the classified I have seen have that has really been a positive, great return on the investments. When we do investments, we do different calculations. We look at the potential in the country, do backward calculations, how much can we then invest in order to see that we really, this really could give a great return. Also we do more standard type of course, risk return type of thinking.
If you look at the return on our share, over the last 5, 6 years, you've seen that it has been close to 30%, then return in this period, if you look at this index. That at least has been a good return in this period. If you go to the organic investments that we have in the online classifieds, we, as you know, invested significantly in the emerging markets in the period 12, 13, 14. We joined forces with Naspers, we did consolidation. That was a great thing to do. As a result of that, investment has gone down in, first of all, in emerging markets. Also at the same time, we do see new opportunities.
We have guided the market currently EUR 80 million-EUR 100 million spending in 2016. Of course that's one of the big contributor there is like Shpock, is like Mexico and others. We don't give guidance for next year because we, I mean, due to competitive situation, I think we are a little bit careful to be too precise on how we will do our future spending. We also invest in product and tech. Rian's presentation really gave examples for that, but it will going in, of course, into taking out more in the advertising space, in targeted advertising, self-serve, and then also looking at different possibilities to take out monetization in the verticals. This will then improve the revenue streams going forward.
At the same time, the costs to have these product and tech. We have also there guided the market with NOK 650 million-NOK 700 million with HQ and product and tech guidance for this year. We have said that we will work to, of course, take out duplication. Looking then into 2018 and onwards, we should also be able to take out some further efficiency in this field. As Rolv Erik said, we are pragmatic on the way we do, so to say, both acquisition, mergers and partnership. We do really believe in consolidation in different markets, and we will continue that route to look for bolt-on acquisitions, mergers if possible, and also partnership if needed in certain markets. We will continue that route going forward.
In the media houses, as Raul explained, we have taken out substantial cost. I would say if you adjust for inflation, I think we have taken out 30%-40% cost savings over this 5-6 year, which is something that we really see as needed and also will continue to take out the efficiency. At the same time, there is a hope in, of course, the digital future that has been talked about. 40%-50% of the cost base in the morning newspapers, it is print and distribution. Clearly it is, it is costly to keep up also the distribution and print in certain parts. We will continue to pursue value-creative M&As, and we have a strong financial source for that.
We have facilities, we have liquidity, and we also have the B shares as a tool. You know that 26% of Schibsted is owned by a foundation, Blommenholm Industrier, which again then are not able to participate in an equity issue. Meaning then that we had to find different way, and that's why we, in 2015, established the B capital as a tool to further grow the company and do have possibilities to participate in, so to say, further consolidation, further acquisition if needed. There is no time plan for time being to do so. We have a prudent capital structure.
We will allow ourselves to be slightly overcapitalized in a certain period, even if we have a target of 1-2 times EBITDA in net interest-bearing debt, and we are lower than that today. We have a stable dividend policy. This gives a reason for a good basis for growing Schibsted going forward. Just to remind you on the B capital, it is something that we established in a way to expand the company for and capital if needed. We believe that the liquidity in the B shares it is particularly low. We of course, would like that to improve, getting closer to, so to say, the pricing also in the A shares. We believe the B capital will be the more liquided share in the future.
As of course, over time it will be in that share class we will do also equity issues. It, just to remind you, it's the same, economic rights in both these two share classes, so it's just the voting that is different in the A and the B. Summing up then, it is the financial target. There is a continuation as what we have communicated to the market before with the 50%-20% top line growth, 35%-50% equity ratio, net interest-bearing debt to EBITDA as before, and the dividend. It is continuing the steady course. That sums up, my presentation. Then, as I said, long-term value creation, discipline on the capital, and then deliver on the targets that we have set.
Thank you, Trond. Now we will open up for a Q&A with Rolf Erik and Trond. Please engage.
Final Q&A session for the day.
Here's the question.
Martin Stenseth Danske. I have a question regarding M&A opportunities. Just a couple of months back, we learned that the Swedish competitive authorities declined the acquisition of Hemnet. We also hear today that you are pursuing M&A opportunities. So in light of this decline, what kind of risk do you see with bolt-on acquisitions in other markets? Do you see a shift in how competitive authorities are viewing bolt-on acquisitions in terms of becoming more dominant in respective markets?
Well, we were surprised by the decision in Sweden because we interpreted the legal situation differently. This is something we always look at when doing a transaction. I think generally we can say that, well, yes, regulators are following this market more now than perhaps five years back. Still, we believe that there are a number of still interesting bolt-on acquisitions that we can do, which will not be affected by the regulatory authorities.
One more question over there. Wait for the mic, please.
Thank you. Marcus Ivar, Boholm. A question on the tech spend that you talked about for 2018. Is that a reduction in absolute numbers? Thank you.
Whether the tax ban was a reduction?
Absolute numbers.
Well, in the spending?
Yeah.
I think that we when we look at the investments, and we have guided market in 2016, I think that you will see a further reduction in some emerging markets. I think that what we will spend then in 2017, we are just in the planning phase of that when it comes to Shpock and other markets. A little bit hesitant to be too precise on that. That's something also we may come back to give more guidance later.
This is not a step down now, but what we said was in 2018, we might see some effects of that, what we have described as the rationalization.
That is also in an absolute number, not relative to revenues.
Well, as in the product and tech, I think that we are building somewhat up the headcount. We have done that, of course, through 2016. We are just in the planning phase how to actually do this integration now, just middle of the reorg into 2017. What we have said is that at least into 2018, it will be further possibilities to at least take out more duplication in certain countries.
Don't forget that this tech spend we're doing is actually enabling us to roll out these products as we have partly demonstrated here.
Mm.
A number of others as well. We think that they are an enabler to realize the ambitions that we presented for you today.
Okay. One more question, if I may. On your guidance of 15% to 20% in classifieds, does that include in the medium term, I suppose? Does that include the revenue potential from AppNexus and this rollout from the growth business in Sweden, et cetera? Thank you.
Well, inherently it does, of course. Fair to say that, if you look at online classifieds, around 25% of the revenue stream is from display. The main source for the revenue generation going forward, also for the 15%-20%, is certainly from the existing verticals and horizontal. It also will give some revenue streams from the AppNexus. It's still early days there, so hopefully that will also could be a contribution to deliver on these targets.
Okay, over here, please.
Ali Al-Abedi from Goldman Sachs. You mentioned that you see quite high potential in the ARPU growth across your operations, partly because you will be developing the verticals. I was wondering, you sort of, you grow revenues when you have a more, well, a deeper product you offer to the professionals. If you can just probably spend a few like a few minutes talking about, like, what exactly do you work on making the vertical product more complete for your professionals?
Yes.
Um.
Well, I think if you look at what I referred to some of the best in class here in the UK, for instance, Autotrader and Rightmove are also good. What they're doing is that they're developing additional tools for the car dealers that are useful in their daily work. Mostly software components that will help them work more effectively. Partly it could be a dashboard that shows the effectiveness of all the ads they're running in different places. It will be inventory management systems. What we're also seeing, what we're working on now is, for instance, pricing tools. Even for car dealers, it's difficult to understand exact, you know, what should be the right price.
Often they go themselves to Blocket and FINN.no and browse to find, well, what are your comparable sites. We can do that in a better and more scientific manner. That will help them in their daily work. Of course, if we deliver good products, then we can charge for those products. If we deliver good products that they start using in their daily work, that also creates a stronger glue between us and them. I think it's a double positive effect there. I think you see some US players are also doing this very, very, very good.
I was just wondering, where are you in the developing those capabilities and parts of the product?
Well, on the car vertical, we have a roadmap which is pretty concrete, and the pricing tools and the dashboard is already being rolled out now. The pricing tools will be rolled out next spring for FINN.no and Blocket. We have concrete plans. I would like to also emphasize what I said this morning, because when I showed you this big gap to the biggest players, this is not, you're not closing such gap in overnight. It just illustrate that there is a potential with rather concrete actions you can work on, which will have then the double benefit of being able to charge more, but also creating a stronger glue with those dealers.
Thanks so much. Just one more clarification question maybe to Sondre. You mentioned that in France, real estate online classified spend is EUR 380 million. I was just trying to reconcile that with SeLoger revenues and Logic-Immo revenues. Like, where do they spend really that much?
It's that's the total online advertising spend.
Thank you. That's the total online advertising spend from all the real estate entrants in the French market.
Does it include display as well?
Yes.
Okay.
Okay.
All right.
We have one more down there, I think.
Hi, Gabe Nabavi from Luxor Capital. Coming back to emerging markets where you're simultaneously cutting down investment spend and then also focusing on monetization and what are some fairly competitive markets, can you just talk a little bit about what you're seeing that makes you comfortable with cutting investment costs in those markets, and whether some of that might be a result of rationalization of the tech platform?
I think Brazil is the obvious example, right? After we did the consolidation in that market, you don't need to spend that much on marketing. I think if you look in other markets that we signal, such as Mexico, it's really because, you know, what you're getting over the most difficult phase, and then the traffic starts to grow organically. This is something we monitor, and I think, you know, many of the followers have sometimes been critical for us that we're spending too much, but we always believe it's to really get this traffic positions is the absolute most important things.
That was for the marketing part of it. I think we're kind of astute of monitoring those expenses to see how much is necessary to spend. When we pull back, it's because we believe that we still are on a good track to reach those number one positions. That was the marketing part of it. There was another part of the question regarding tech spend, or?
It was the question there was just if any of that reduction in investment spend was actually because of the rationalization of your technology platform spend or if that was all marketing?
Well, not yet, really. That might materialize in the future, but not yet. We're still, you know, developing the roadmap and starting to roll out the products. Not yet.
Okay. I think we will.
Wrap up.
this off.
Well.
And-
Yeah.
Go Fredrick.
I would like to thank you all very much for coming here. We appreciate that you spend time in showing interest in our company. I hope that we have been able to demonstrate to you that we're in the management. We're very excited about the future prospects of Schibsted. We believe we have a number of interesting opportunities. Yes, there are some challenges, but we are investing, as you've seen, a lot in our products and in our tech capabilities, and we believe that will enable us to continue the positive growth story of Schibsted. I can tell you that after this meeting, we're continuing on to New York, where we'll have a similar conference tomorrow. It's actually also a very good turnout there.
If someone wants to join us even there, please hop on the flight this afternoon. I think, I'll, what I hope is that you'll be able to spend some time with us also over lunch and, there take the opportunity with to mingle with management. Thank you so much for coming. I hope you stay for lunch. Thank you very much.