Avito talks about the restoration of demand for website development

The demand for website creation services in April-June increased by several times in relation to both 2022 and pre-war 2021, according to Avito. The company also talks about a comparable interest in online promotion, linking the trend with the revitalization of small businesses. Clients on ad services are mainly sought by private specialists, not agencies, and services are offered by novice webmasters and marketers who have completed online courses, market participants note.

The number of requests for contacts of specialists offering marketing, advertising, website creation and promotion services on the Avito ad service exceeded 500,000 in the second quarter of the year, the company told Kommersant.

Representatives of the service noted an increase in demand for these services, including in relation to the period preceding the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine. Thus, the demand for creating and promoting websites grew 3.3 times compared to the second quarter of 2021 and tripled compared to the second quarter of 2022. In marketing, demand grew by 49% and 153%, respectively.

Georgy Hakobyan, director of the Avito Services vertical, attributed the changes to the increased activity of private entrepreneurship, including due to the opportunity to find specialists without hiring a staff: “This format is especially beneficial for owners of small and medium-sized businesses, including those in the regions.” The company added that the demand for services in these categories grew in 2022, but not at the same pace (by 24% in the field of website development and by 44% in the field of marketing). Yandex Services did not respond to Kommersant’s request.

Development and marketing agencies usually do not use classifieds as a way to find customers, “mostly micro-businesses go there,” Evgeny Borovkov, commercial director of Art of Automation, clarifies: “Their services are business-oriented, not consumer-oriented.”

Mr. Borovkov added that it is not always possible to talk about website development as such, since not every customer needs their own space on the web: “Many people successfully get by with just a company profile on Yandex Business and promotion through Promo Pages. Specialists in working with these tools are also represented on the ad services.”

Interest in marketing services from private specialists is associated with the growth of online commerce – in particular, the development of marketplaces and the legalization of parallel imports, says Aleksey Shtarev, CEO of the PromoPult promotion automation platform: dealing with detailed briefs and high agency prices.” He clarified that even those entrepreneurs who work mainly on marketplaces strive to develop sites: “Their visibility in search engines is still important, as it creates a channel for attracting customers.”

At the same time, Natalya Ustimenko, managing partner of the JetStyle agency, believes that the increase in the number of requests to specialists on classifieds may speak “more about how sites attract performers and customers, and not about changes in demand in the whole market.” She believes that the sites manage to attract first of all novice web developers – for example, those who have completed online courses: “The threshold for entering the market is very low, especially when it comes to creating the simplest business card sites.”

The Smart Ranking agency, which evaluates the online education market, reported problems with the employment of graduates of courses in IT specialties (see Kommersant of May 27).

Cases when employees of web agencies become private specialists are quite rare, Mr. Borovkov confirms: “Experienced employees are more likely to go into in-house development, that is, they move to the staff of companies with their own teams. If they establish their business, then, as a rule, under already acquired customers, bypassing the search for customers on classifieds.

Yuri Litvinenko