Written by Dejan Bizinger, a web
manager at Serbian media company B92.net, and edited by Richard MacManus
Serbia is a country located
in Southeast Europe with around 9 million people. Around 1.5 million Serbians use the
Internet and the majority of them are still dial-up users. The main reasons for the small
broadband penetration are the economic situation in Serbia and problems with the infrastructure –
many people still have doublers, so they can’t have ADSL (despite broadband
connection like ADSL being available since 2005).
The web market in Serbia is developing, but currently there are not more than 20
quality web sites and services. The online advertising market in Serbia in 2005 was
500,000 Euros – and around 50% of that went to the B92.net web site (see below, in the
blogging section). This year it is projected that the online advertising market will be 1
Million Euros. However a boom is expected on the Serbian Web scene, because more and more
people are becoming broadband users. Also soon a domestic credit card payment provider
will be introduced, which will enable webmasters to monetize their content/services.
Web 2.0 Apps
In Serbia there is a news start page called Naslovi.net, which means ‘Titles’. It aggregates the
daily top news from Serbia. While it doesn’t have the functionality of a web 2.0
start page like Netvibes or Pageflakes, it is still a useful and popular
destination for people who want to find all the top news on one page.
The most popular Web 2.0 service from Serbia that has gained world popularity is
called activeCollab, from a developer named
Ilija Studen. It is a free project management Basecamp alternative – it has gotten many diggs and coverage in some of the world’s most famous tech blogs.
Another popular, recently launched, Web 2.0 service is called Donesi.com – which means ‘Bring’. Donesi.com has plans
for internationalization, as indicated by the language options available. The purpose of
this service is to publish offers from as many restaurants as possible, so that people
can order food online.
There is also a price comparison service on MyShop.co.yu, similar to services like BizRate and Shopping. Recently, it launched an auction web site
called Limundo.com, which hasn’t yet achieved
popularity.
Serbia has two good Web 2.0 services for language usage. The first is called Metak and it is an Ajax-driven Serbian-English and
English-Serbian dictionary. The owners decided to call this service Metak, which means
Bullet – because they claim it is very fast! Another language service is called Vokabular and its purpose is to give the meaning of
different Serbian words. It is a Serbian language dictionary.
There are several popular online dating websites in Serbia. One of the oldest is Poljubac, which means ‘Kiss’. This service was
acquired several years ago by Romanian company Neogen.
Another dating service is Romance
Café, which was acquired by a German company. The majority of the service is
free – and for a modest fee that is paid through SMS, members get more advanced
features.
Although not a web 2.0 application, I want to mention an IT web forum called Elitesecurity – which has more than 100,000
members. It is the biggest IT forum in Southeast Europe and one of the biggest in
Europe.
Big companies – except B92 and Telekom Srbija (which launched two portals in 2006) –
still don’t focus on creating big and profitable web sites. Also big companies
mostly have not invested in or bought popular Serbian web destinations. However that is
expected to change in 2007!
Blogs in Serbia
In Serbia, real blogging services are still in their infancy. There are many less
bloggers in Serbia than in nearby countries like Croatia and Hungary.
One Serbian blog service is called MojBlog (part of the regional MyBlog.gs network). Another
open blog service can be found on the Nadlanu web
site, which is owned by Telekom Srbija. Also,
recently a long-awaited blog service was launched on the Blog.co.yu domain.
The most visited web site in Serbia and one of the most popular in Southeast Europe is
B92.net [disclaimer: Dejan works for B92.net as a web
manager]. It gets over 100,000 daily unique visitors and has an Alexa ranking of around
2000. B92.net is owned by media house B92, which also has TV and radio stations. They
also launched the B92 Blog – it is not an open blog
service, but a so-called V.I.P. blog and invitation only. Many of the bloggers there are
high profile people from the public life of Serbia, such as writers, actors and
politicians. There are around 10,000 daily unique visitors and more than 5,000
registered members on B92 Blog.
When we talk about blogging in Serbia, it is also worth mentioning a blog service
called Planeta Srbija – which aggregates
dozens of blogs in the Serbian blogosphere.
Richard’s Summary
Many thanks to Dejan Bizinger for
contributing this post about Serbia! As usual, if there are further Serbian web apps you
know of that we may’ve missed – please add to the comments. Also if you’re from Serbia
and have some interesting information to tell, feel free to leave a comment. R/WW readers
are enjoying this international web apps series (based on all the positive feedback I get
about it!), so any further information you contribute will be much appreciated.
This post is part of Read/WriteWeb’s continuing coverage of international Web markets.
Other countries profiled so far have been Germany, Holland, Poland, Korea, United Kingdom, Russia, Spain, China, Turkey, Italy, Brazil, France, Japan, India, Austria, Sweden, Australia and
Hungary.
