OLX Indonesia’s Response towards Review by DailySocial

In response to our previous analysis on OLX Indonesia’s self-claim and its suitability to the data from SimilarWeb and Alexa, OLX Indonesia gave us a clarification through an official letter stating that it would be much wiser for us to review and re-analyze the data that we used back then.

As a reminder, the data from SimilarWeb that we used in the article showed that there was a significant fall down in traffic for the past four months (from June 2014 – one and a half month after the company got re-branded). Given that fact, we concluded that OLX’s claim saying that the re-branding didn’t affect its performance was not absolutely true.

From the letter it sent to us, OLX suggested that while the SimilarWeb’s diagram was an estimation of a third party, it didn’t include the users’ visit classification, which tells which device they use to access the website: desktop, mobile, or apps. However, it’s still quite a shame for OLX not to provide us more assuring objections based on its own compiled data.

“As we know that in general, there are more and more Indonesians who access online websites and social media due to the increasing number of smartphone users in the country. In this regard, it is necessary to determine the device that users use to visit the platform when it comes to analyzing the number of visitors,” OLX Indonesia clarified.

With no purpose on having any “self-defense” at all, OLX Indonesia actually did the same research as we did, making use of the SimilarWeb platform as well. From its investigation, OLX claimed that it wasn’t only it that faced such negative trend, but also a number of other media, e-commerce, and classified ads websites, even Facebook wasn’t an exception.

OLX’s purpose of sending the letter was crystal clear. The company intended to clarify our doubts on its traffic performance. It countered any suggestion stating that its negative performance was rooted from its decision of re-branding itself by claiming that it wasn’t only OLX which got declined in term of performance, but also almost each and every Indonesian digital industry’s big player as well.

While the factors of the negative trend have yet been determined, OLX should be able to do more in clarifying our doubts by providing us more concrete data that can lead us to the ‘okay, we were wrong’ statement.

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