The week of summits
The highlights of this week are no doubt the Webrazzi Summit and the Retail Days.
Webrazzi, founded by Arda Kutsal, is the leading source for any technology-related business news in Turkey. The Webrazzi Summit was held yesterday and covered a range of topics, including digital marketing, social media, e-commerce, venture capital, angel investment, online gaming, mobile applications and more.
Retail Days is an event in which leaders of the retail industry come together to discuss what will happen in the near future. Looking at the agendas of both organizations, one can easily say that social gaming, video sharing and online shopping can be underlined as the leading topics. Turkish demographics point in those directions, too.
According to Mike Read of comScore Europe, the market of youngsters age 15 and up grew by 4 percent. Turkey is the sixth biggest in Europe and 13th biggest in the world in terms of online market size, with 23.1 million users. The users, Read said, spend 32.7 hours online on average per week.
Read underlined the importance of online videos and said there was a great business potential as Turkish people watched 4.3 billion videos in the last month alone, and the number of videos being watched increased by 65 percent on a yearly basis. A user watches an average of 200 videos per month, putting Turkey in third place after the U.S. and Germany. Only 4 percent of users don’t use social media tools, Read said.
Hanzade Doğan Boyner spoke on behalf of Doğan Online and said the company had 14 million unique subscribers and 700 million Turkish Liras of revenue.
Sina Afra of Markafoni picked up where Hanzade Doğan Boyner left and said that Markafoni aimed to be valued at $1 billion in the next three years. He said Markofoni would like to create 12-15 similar brands in different countries such as Russia and Poland. Afra said the company didn’t spend a dime for marketing until it reached 1 million customers; they are now spending $1 million per month only for online marketing tools. That’s more than most brick-and-mortar businesses in Turkey.
Afra’s partner, Tolga Tatari, will speak at the Retail Days today. Websites like secretcv.com and jobnak.com will also be present to share their experiences.
If you are an investor and reading this column on your trip to Turkey, you might think of booking some meetings with the people mentioned above and join the Retail Days as Turkey presents decent alternatives to European online business ventures
