2001 The Year of the SME

1
2001 The Year of the SME

• George Jewell
• General Manager
• toronto.com

2

• Observations re the SME market today
• toronto.com experience to date
• What opportunities there may be for you here in
  the room.

3
SME FACTS

• Small lt50 employees
• Medium lt 499 employees
• 97 Cdn businesses lt 50 employees
• 78 Cdn businesses lt 5 employees
• Business lt 50 employees account for over 36 of
  employment in Canada
• 52 of all off-line advertising is local
• 14 of online advertising is local

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Business Size (Employees)
Source Canadian Federation of Independent
Business
5
Source IAB Survey of Publishers
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toronto.com - background

• Joint Venture between Torstar, Sympatico-Lycos
  City Search
• 2 in CitySearchs network of 65 cities,
  trailing only New York City
• 9,000,000 monthly pages views
• 359,000 unique visitors
• 1000 website customers

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toronto.com - Consumer usage

• 80 had looked for specific info re buying
  selling a product
• 61 dealt with a they saw on toronto.com
• 67 of these people had never dealt with that
  business before

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toronto.com- Customer Evolution

• Year 1- Sept 97
• Experimentation
• Little or no plan around site re objectives
• Price based not a business based decision
• Entering Year 4
• Media valuegt web development
• 2,000,000 plus monthly page views at customers
  site

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BARRIERS TO ENTRY OF SME

• Time
• Expertise
• Integration into operations
• Perceived Consumer Demand
• Costs
• ROI

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Key Drivers

• Increasing Simplicity of Transaction
• Application development targeted low end of
  market
• Creation of marketplaces suited for SME success
• Last mile provisioning
• Empori
• Who is next, Beckers?

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Key Drivers

• Market Pressure
• Suppliers
• Consumers
• Competitors
• Internal Growth