i tried clip.vn but youtube still my choice for watching and sharing video. i also visited vietnamworks but only to know what it is. baomoi (current version) seem to be my first page i open when start browser in morning, it looks like google news. however, because of the lack of function allow me to view related news without go to original page, i cannot move away from other feed reader.
although many services funded by IDG, they (IDG) haven’t changed any thing of my daily life and cannot be the leader (mine).
and so far, online services war still and alwayls continue, i’ve not found the leader.

Clip.vn is sucks :(. It’s really nightmare to play video on this site. Exactly, IDG is really the leader of Vietnamese Online Services.

@ePi.Longo indeed

IDG is only the investor. They care about money not about the services themselves. So hard to say IDG is a player in online services.

If following the argument that lead to conclusion that IDG is the leader, I would argue that VNese users are leaders. Without them, no IDG money and dead VN’s web-services.

Vietnamworks could still consider as the leading web-service in Vietnam. It has a strong business model. It’s highly profitable and useful for tonnes of people. But like many other pro.

Clip.vn and baomoi.vn are nothing new and have very vulnerable business model (based on banner-ad which, unfortunately, leads to the demise of Yahoo!).

I wonder about Baomoi’s business model, or how it makes money or how it will make money? From the users? or try to take money from investors like IDG. If that’s the case, what’s next? and are you sure IDG or other investors will invest in baomoi if they couldn’t return the investment.

Another thing should be considered: such kind of things like baomoi is not new to international (esp. US) investor, they will look at the operation (surely in terms of financial aspect) of the US sites before deciding whether to invest in it.

My second cent.

Long@Vietlog :

Baomoi isn’t the only portfolio of IDG and I think IDG always have a bigger picture than the picture of Baomoi.
Now, it’s hard to say exactly that where Web 2.0’s website can gather money, but I believe all of Vietnamese’s online services can gather money from people who is satisfied with their services. So, who is “people” here? Maybe angel investors like IDG, maybe the real people. But the first thing we need to do : make people satisfied before talking bout money. And if some services are not new to international but can satisfy people, I believe in its success.

@ePi.Longo

It’s impossible to call angel investors as people in your meaning. They are investors and what they care is money, believe me.

i don’t know in the view of many users who are familiar with surfing vnn, vnexpress and dantri, whether baomoi is cool or not since baomoi is nothing new even with such mentioned site. Why do I say that? Just look at dantri, they mostly collect “article”, “gossips” etc from the other sources. There are only few differences: (i) unlike baomoi, dantri also produces their own articles, albeit a very small number; (ii) unlike dantri, you put the link to the original source (a thump up); (iii) unlike dantri, surfing baomoi takes more time since uses have to go backward and forward to read an article; (iv) in my humble opinion, your code is not efficient, it takes quite a time to load the whole page.

In terms of making money, I doubt about the prospect of web 20. Look at twitter, facebook and the other folks. Not to degrade people there. They have a very big head but still struggle to make good money.

Can baomoi be categorized as web20?

@TuanNguyen

I see your point. You may still argue that you have your own community and
it may be big. But is it big enough for a news aggregators.

No no, Quantalon is leader of vn online services ! That’s right.

$ is the leader of our choices

Hey Chip, thanks for the shout-out!

(PS - VietnamWorks has over 160,000 CVs, not 30,000.)

There’s no real online service in Vietname. They are all shit.

Long@Vietlog: “Vietnamworks could still consider as the leading web-service in Vietnam. It has a strong business model. It’s highly profitable and useful for tonnes of people.”
=>Vietnamworks is “highly profitable”? This could not be further from truth!

And it beats me that CHarvey selectively pointed out the misquoted number of resumes but did not comment on the profit point. Well, while Vietnamworks is a privately held company and hence it does not have the obligation to disclose the figures, it’s better not to unrealistically hype up the figures.

@Chip:

1/ “Highly profitable” often refers to high net/operating margin. And job recruitment is a low margin business (which is NOT necessarily bad - Amazon is a low margin business but they are doing well in general)

2/ I am not criticizing job recruitment business - I’m just questioning Vietnamworks’ performance and business models.

Below are some of the world’s top recruitment companies.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MWW
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:MAN
http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE:RHI

Monster is arguably the top performer and their operating margin for 2008 is 12.65% (RBI 9.11% and Manpower 2.36%).

Operating margin is one of the key metrics to evaluate the operating performance and eventually profitability of a business. The only thing can help offset a low margin is extremely high volume. Take Amazon for example. According to this http://www.google.com/finance?q=amazon, their operating margin and net margin are 4.39% and 3.41%, respectively. However, because Amazon has such huge volume of transactions and hence enormous revenue, they are doing pretty well in terms of profit.

3/ In conclusion, because:

a/ job recruitment in general is by nature a low margin business (some small segments might have higher margin but I’m just saying the job recruitment as a whole)

b/ job recruitment is a CYCLICAL business - people hire more during economic boom and hire less in recession (yes, in recession firms don’t stop recruiting but demand is much less than during good times).

c/ while the number of firms that have demand for white collar staff in developing economies including Vietnam is often on the rise, the pace is slow and eventually there’s a growth ceiling.

d/ The supply of white collar staff (from entry level to senior level) in Vietnam is extremely limited. And Vietnamworks is not doing much to increase this supply pool.

…the only way to have a profitable job recruitment business is to keep operating expenses as low as possible. Has Vietnamworks done a good job with this at all? Maybe you want to ask the once-glorious Indochina Capital, who invested approx. 6 mil in Vietnamworks, only to see all the money burned and no sight of profit yet.

Chip, what’s your thought on my comment above?