For the first time a search engine marketing conference if to take place in Bulgaria. The event is named “SEO Conference 2009″ and it has every chance to become *the* web event of the year (in Bulgaria). The main purpose [...]]]> For the first time a search engine marketing conference if to take place in Bulgaria. The event is named “SEO Conference 2009″ and it has every chance to become *the* web event of the year (in Bulgaria). The main purpose of the conference is to bring together SEO and SEM specialists, site owners and online businesses so that a practical discussion and knowledge exchange about SEM is achieved.

The date announced for the event is April 10, 2009 and the place – InterExpoCenter in Sofia. The schedule features 7 lectures from well-known Bulgarian SEO and SEM specialists and a round table at the end. Topics include “SEO for bloggers”, “SEO vs PPC”, “Link Building strategies and tactics”. I am proud to be one of the lecturers and the topic I will speak about is “SEO for e-commerce sites”. I believe the program has a very practical focus and the hour and half discussion time at the end will be of utmost benefit to all who attend.

Thanks to the sponsors of SEO Conference 2009 there is no entrance fee. The only requirement is that a registration form has to be filled. The event enjoys great interest and almost all of the 300 available places are already booked. If you would like to attend the conference please note that only VIP places are left. Please write to us from this page for more details.

If you are unable to come to the conference – there will be a live online video broadcast of the event. More details will be published here when the event approaches.

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The vertical search field in Bulgaria has seen some development in the last 6-12 months and in this post I’ll try to cover the current situation and outline the future trends.

Only two years ago virtually no vertical search engines existed [...]]]> The vertical search field in Bulgaria has seen some development in the last 6-12 months and in this post I’ll try to cover the current situation and outline the future trends.

Only two years ago virtually no vertical search engines existed in the Bulgarian web. There were some rudimentary attempts at vertical search but they were either performing poor or were marketed badly. Interestingly enough, some of the first attempts were in the field of shopping search, despite the low penetration of online shopping.

Now there are about a dozen vertical search engines operating in the Bulgarian web and even international players have entered the field. Four types of search engines are on the market right now: real estate, comparison shopping, news and music.

Real Estate search engines:

Imotera.com
Propse.com

Comparison Shopping search engines:

Izgodnobg.com
Pazaruvaj.com
Cenite.com
Namerimi.com

News search engines:

Rss.bg
Alfarss.info
News.jabse.com

Music search engines:

Mkfun.com
Dirimp3.com

Job search engines:

Rabot

Some of these are still not “true” search engines in the sense that they do not have a crawler but get feeded by RSS (Imotera.com, Pazaruvaj.com, Rss.bg, Alfarss.com). All of the search engines listed above are developed and owned by Bulgarian companies except Pazaruvaj.com, which is owned by the Hungarian company Arukereso.hu Ltd.

In terms of visitors and popularity comparison shopping engines stand far above all other types of vertical search. This could be attributed to numerous factors like the marketing of the services, competition in their field, etc.

When it comes to advertising budgets spent on vertical search ads – there are no publicly available statistics. From what is visible as running banner and text ads on those engines one can make the conclusion that this is still an undeveloped area. My hopes as developer and owner of one of the listed engines – Izgodnobg.com is that this is about to change.

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You wont read about it in an official Google post in any of the Google blogs I am aware of, but it’s a fact from like 2 months now – Google does transliteration from Latin letters to Bulgarian letters when [...]]]> You wont read about it in an official Google post in any of the Google blogs I am aware of, but it’s a fact from like 2 months now – Google does transliteration from Latin letters to Bulgarian letters when searching*. The service is old enough for checks to be made and conclusions to be drawn.

It is not uncommon to see Bulgarian words written with Latin letters when examining referral logs or when using keyword tools. This type of searching seems to be most common among teenagers, but it is not limited to just them. The actual percentage of such queries is probably unknown even to Google, since there are so many words that can be transliterated. Some words become valid English words when transliterated and others have more than one (non-standard) transliteration versions in use which further complicates the task of spotting such words.

Not before long, when a searcher entered a query, containing transliterated words, he or she would get too little results and would definitely miss a lot of great websites. This resulted in a poor search overall experience.

However, Google has taken steps in alleviating the situation and now returns much more relevant results where it failed before. It is using the official standard for Bulgarian-to-Latin transliteration as approved by the Bulgarian Government so it catches most cases. In cases Google is not sure about whether or not this is a transliterated word it gives the “Did you mean…” message, suggesting the right transliteration, like here. Nice job, Google!

Website owners, webmasters and SEOs need not worry any more about people who are trying to reach their websites with searches with Latin transliteration versions of the keywords.

* This is a problem not specific to Bulgaria, though. As far as I know the problem with Non-English speaking users entering sometimes queries with a transliteration of the keywords in Latin letters is present in China, Greece, Japan, Russia and other Slavic language countries. I have no information about whether or not this problem is solved in these countries but I hope my fellow Multilingual-Search editors will help

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Google is about to hold a Google University event in Bulgaria on the 13th of March. The six hour event will take place in the Hilton Hotel in Sofia with a main topic – “How to succesfully advertise in Google”.

So [...]]]> Google is about to hold a Google University event in Bulgaria on the 13th of March. The six hour event will take place in the Hilton Hotel in Sofia with a main topic – “How to succesfully advertise in Google”.

So far so good – mighty Google turns its eye on Bulgaria and tries to promote its Adwords advertising platform. Invitations were sent out to a number of selected people (selected on basis of… ?) and these were given a link to www.googleuniversity.eu. The page says to register for the event as fast as possible since the number of attendees is limited and registration is done on a first-come, first-served basis.

One of the selected people, who also happens to be a well-respected blogger among the SEO and internet marketers crowd here, published the invitation he received on his blog. He also had commented about the legitimity of the event because the invitation doesn’t fit in what one expects from Google.

The language is not the style you are used to seeing from Google, the domain is registered on behalf of some unknown Polish company and the contact info on the page itself leads to that same Polish firm. Quite a few people suspected this was a scam, including me. Actually I remember saying that if it turned out not to be a scam I would be very suprised. And I meant it.

Nevertheless, even under the suspicion that this is just an email harvesting scam or an unscrupulous advertising company trying to use Google to attract attention, a couple of hundred people could not resist taking part in the event (if real) and enthusiastically signed up for it. News about the event quickly spread around the blogosphere and the various social bookmarking sites.

About 24 hours later they all received an answer from the Google Adwords team saying “We regret to inform you, but your registration have been rejected because this event is invitation only”. These letters caused quite a lot of disappointment among these who registered and had been rejected. There were even some people who initially got their invitations confirmed and THEN CANCELLED!

What happened is – Google never disclosed to those invited that the invitation they received is personal and that information about the event should not be distributed. They also failed to implement a say, unique code solution so that only people who received a correct code could register.

This does not end here though. Letters were sent and phone calls were made to some bloggers and even to a blog aggregator service, demanding that information about the event registration is to be pulled down. As you can imagine, this resulted in even more reaction demanding official apologies from Google and better handling of the situation they created.

A few people, including me, wrote to Constantina Stoyanova from Google EU Headquaters as she is responsible for Google Adwords in Bulgaria. No answers have been received so far. Having a one-way communication is definitely not good in this case.

I do not know how you’d call it, but for me leaving some of your biggest supporters and fans, current and future clients and evangelists of your services so disappointed is quite a disaster and deserves more attention than what we have seen so far.

Multilingual-Search.com will keep you informed of developments.

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In 2007 the amount of money spent on online advertising in Bulgaria has increased with about 60 percent, compared to 2006 spending. Total net in 2007 spending was 12 mln leva (around 9 mln USD), representing a significant growth from [...]]]> In 2007 the amount of money spent on online advertising in Bulgaria has increased with about 60 percent, compared to 2006 spending. Total net in 2007 spending was 12 mln leva (around 9 mln USD), representing a significant growth from the 7.5 mln last year. Expectations are for another big rise in spending in 2008 – to about 18 mln leva (around 14 mln USD). The forcasts are from Investor.BG PLC – the third largest internet company in Bulgaria.

It is expected that online spending will account for 5-10 % of the total advertisment spending, compared to around 3% currently.

Telecommunication companies remain the biggest online advertisers. They are followed by companies from the financial sector – mainly banks. Technology companies like HP have also increased their online spendings and are starting to abandon traditional media in favor internet advertising. The automotive industry has also increased its online advertising budgets, but we are yet to see a company from this sector among the top advertisers.

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Dir.bg, one of the first and largest web portals in Bulgaria has just announced on its website the launch of a new standalone service – Diri.bg. “Diri” in Bulgarian is an old-style word for “Tarsi”(v), meaning – “Search”. This new [...]]]> Dir.bg, one of the first and largest web portals in Bulgaria has just announced on its website the launch of a new standalone service – Diri.bg. “Diri” in Bulgarian is an old-style word for “Tarsi”(v), meaning – “Search”. This new service is in direct competition with the already existing Jabse (info: New Bulgarian search engine gaining visibility). Bellow I’ll attempt to dig into Diri.bg and to make a comparison with Jabse.com, which has gained much more traction since I last wrote about it.

Visitors to Diri.bg are presented with a very clean interface – just search box and tabs with vertical search suggestions. The verticals are as follows: News, Images, Video, Music, Products, Blogs, Forums, Wiki, Jobs, Law, Real Estate, Auto, Mobile Phones, Cinema. At first glance they seem quite nice, but as it turns out, searching in Images, Music, Law, Products, Forums will only return results from corresponding section of Dir.bg. The other tabs include like 4-5 sites in which the search is actually conducted. The vertical searches have too poor diversification and are also a lot Dir.bg oriented.

Next thing you notice right away is the Wiki tab, which returns results from Wikipedia only. Diri.bg also employs a concept, similar to the “universal search” concept at Google: images, video, news and Wikipedia results, relevant to the search query are presented on the right side of the page, paralell to the main organic results.

Another thing to note is the “Helper”, which is a drop down box that drops as you type and shows you keywords that the engine thinks are related to what you are typing.

If you look at speed – it’s a bit slower than Google but still fast enough.

So far with the relatively good stuff. Aside from poor diversity in vertical search, the user expirience suffers hugely from the worst ordering and grouping of the results I’ve seen so far in a search engine. There is no apparent order in the results, you are in no way presented with the most relevant results first. Many queries were subject to testing with this in mind. The grouping of results is poorly implemented, so if you search for Titanik in the Cinema area you’ll get 11 pages of IMBD.com results (which are in English, thus not accesible for a lot of the potential users). The next 3 pages are filled with results from Dir.bg itself. You can also try “mp3″ in General search. It currently returns 3 pages with results from just one domain – mp3.bg. Searching for “blog” presents you with 100 pages from just one domain – Blog.bg.

Currently advanced search operators and options like the ones we are used to in Google, Yahoo, MSN are not supported at all. The engine does not use robots.txt or meta tags to forbid its SERPs from being indexed by other SEs which definitely raises some eyebrows.

On the webmaster communication side things are bellow zero. Absolutely no information is available for site owners / webmasters. Nothing about their web crawler. Nothing at all.

A quick comparison with Jabse:

>Jabse:

Populariy: Jabse had increased its traffic by 400% in the last year to 20 000 unique visits a day
Index Size: Has 5.5 million pages in index
Business model: All revenue is from contextual ads served by Easytrader.bg

Remains with strong position as far as quality of general search and image search results are conserned.

>Diri.bg:

Popularity: No traffic estimations yet, but it will have strong support from Dir.bg
Index Size: Claims 50 million pages in its index
Business model: Diri.bg has not presented a business model so far, so nobody has a clue about how will it support itself.

Looks better in some verticals, can look even better if it diversifies its sources. Could perform better general search if the ordering and grouping of the results are improved. Diri.bg has better perspectives for future development, given the resourses it can operate with.

Will Jabse or Diri.bg develop enough to become a factor in the Bulgarian Internet, despite the presense of Google is yet to be seen.

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It is now three months since the introduction of AdSense for content in Bulgarian and it sounds like a good time for an overview of the effect it had on the market.

Before AdSense

Before AdSense came to the scene there were [...]]]> It is now three months since the introduction of AdSense for content in Bulgarian and it sounds like a good time for an overview of the effect it had on the market.

Before AdSense

Before AdSense came to the scene there were two PPC contextual networks in Bulgaria: Easytrader.bg and Neogen.bg. The first one is an entirely Bulgarian undertaking, started by three associates. It offers Pay-Per-Click, Pay-Per-Lead and Pay-Per-Sale advertising platform on which advertisers and publishers connect. It currently has 850 websites and 50 active affiliate programs in it’s network and processes around 50 000 000 impressions per day.

Neogen.bg has a much smaller penetration, fewer advertisers and fewer partners – 170 only. It is a Romanian owned website offering a lot of different services.

Those systems were adopted by a number of small and medium websites but they failed to get to the larger websites who sold their advertising space through agencies.

Then came AdSense

With Google’s popularity behind and the adoption AdSense has in the English Internet AdSense for content was actually waited for by many webmasters in Bulgaria. They’ve all seen AdSense blocks on international websites and have heard about the nice income you can get from it. So, when a representative of the Bulgarian AdSense team made an announced the start of AdSense for content in Bulgarian on the most-popular Bulgarian webmaster forum there were reactions like, quote: “I’m going to the nearest bar to celebrate!”.

Critisism followed immediately about the ads not being targeted enough (quite a number of humorous situations were spotted), about the annoynment of the ads, etc. Nevertheless there was a quick and widespread adoption of AdSense for content. Many blogs and small websites quickly put the ad blocks on their pages. A bit suprisingly – many of the largest and most established websites turned to AdSense for part of their income, for example Dnevnik.bg, Investor.bg, Snimka.bg, Aha.bg, Elmaz.com, Vbox7.com, Ibox.bg, Sportni.bg, Netinfo.bg and others.

Additionally, many new projects were started, especially in the social bookmarking vertical which rely solely on AdSense revenue as of this moment.

This is happening despite the small number of advertisers involved so far and also despite the poor relevance of the ads. It appears that AdSense proves to be, so far, a real energizer for the Bulgarian internet.

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13 may be a fatal number, but obviously not at Google. Announcment on the Official Google Blog says that iGoogle has been localized for 13 new languages. Users speaking

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- [...]]]> 13 may be a fatal number, but obviously not at Google. Announcment on the Official Google Blog says that iGoogle has been localized for 13 new languages. Users speaking

- Arabic
- Bulgarian
- Catalian
- Croatian
- Icelandic
- Indonesian
- Latvian
- Lithuanian
- Malay
- Serbian
- Slovak
- Slovenian
and Tagalog can now use the personalized version of Google in their own language. With a total of 42 language versions iGoogle is accesible by 99% of Internet users in their native language.

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The new edition of E-Bulgaria report (published annually by Vitosha Research) contains some interesting insights about Internet penetration in Bulgaria and how Bulgarians use the technology.

Even though the research predicts over 33% Internet penetration in January 2007, things are not [...]]]> The new edition of E-Bulgaria report (published annually by Vitosha Research) contains some interesting insights about Internet penetration in Bulgaria and how Bulgarians use the technology.

Even though the research predicts over 33% Internet penetration in January 2007, things are not looking much better for people who seek to make money in the Bulgarian Internet in the short term. Bulgarian users use the net mainly to communicate with relatives, friends and business partners. ICQ, Skype, Yahoo Messenger and IRC chats are leading the chart of the most used online applications (in that order). The next in popularity among the online activites are downloading/streaming movies, music and playing online games.

Disappointing 2% of the population have been involved in online shopping once or more in the last three months. Online population in Bulgaria has more buying power than the average for the country, yet, it views Internet mainly as an enthertainment and communications channel and not as a way to make business or shop.

In spite of that, internet marketing is now considered an integral part of the marketing mix by most companies. On average, 3% of the marketing budgets are now directed to online advertising and promotion. The tendency is for that percent to grow.

An interesting indicator about the role of SEM in that mix is that among other tracked characteristics of business websites in the survey are “Google PageRank” (average PR of all websites included in the survey) and “Predicted Google PageRank” (again average). For those curious, the values are around 2.5 average PR for most groups of business websites. The number is not suprising, given the size of the Bulgarian web.

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Bulgarian internet advertising market made a huge step forward by increasing its revenues with 81% last year. Recent market studies show rise in online advertising spending from 3.1 million leva (approx. 1.9 million USD) to over 5.6 million leva [...]]]> Bulgarian internet advertising market made a huge step forward by increasing its revenues with 81% last year. Recent market studies show rise in online advertising spending from 3.1 million leva (approx. 1.9 million USD) to over 5.6 million leva (approx. 3.42 million USD). The results were announced on a press conference hold by Investor.bg on 01.03.2006.

Other interesting highlight from the confernce was the announcment of top internet advertiser groups and individual advertisers by media value. Communications and finance sectors account for more than 60% of the advertising volume.

Top five internet advertisers for 2005 are:

• Bulgarian Telecom (telecommunications and intenet)
• NMSS (political party)
• Raiffeisen Bank (finance)
• Biohim Bank (finance)
• MobilTel (mobile communications)
• GIC (insurance company)

Still, in the beginning of 2006 Bulgarian online advertisting market volume accounts for only 2% of Bulgarian advertising market. There is a lot of space for expansion. One problem we observe is the lack of understanding of internet marketing from advertising agencies. They prefer to tell a client that internet is too expensive or without perspective rather than making the effort to enter the internet adverting space.

Predictions for 2010 show that Bulgarian online marketing spending to be around 50 million levs (approx. 31 million USD).

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A little battle took place today on an auction for the Bulgarian national A-class Wireless Network licence. All top players in the Bulgarian communications industry were there bidding for 2 licences which allow the building of national-wide wireless network in [...]]]> A little battle took place today on an auction for the Bulgarian national A-class Wireless Network licence. All top players in the Bulgarian communications industry were there bidding for 2 licences which allow the building of national-wide wireless network in the 21 MHz frequency. “Bulgaria Telecom”, the former monopoly in communications in Bulgaria, left the auction when bids reached 4 million leva (about 2.5 million USD). “Mobiltel”, the current leader in mobile communications, abandoned the auction a little earlier.

The winners “Trans Telecom” and “Cable Net” will pay 5 million leva each (about 3.1 million USD) for the right to build A-class wireless networks in Bulgaria. There will be a second auction for the B-class networks in the following days.

Currently less than 1 percent of the internet population in Bulgaria prefers wireless. However there are reasons to believe in the expansion of wireless conectivity. There are some remote regions in Bulgaria where satelite or wireless is the only option both for business and home users and they will most certainly be the first to benefit from the expansion of wireless networks.

Sources:
www.investor.bg

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Bulgarian internet is getting bigger and mature. Many statistics prove that fact. Millions of web users are now online. Thounsand and hundreds of thousands of websites are serving their needs. Still, Bulgarian search engines are nowhere to be seen on [...]]]> Bulgarian internet is getting bigger and mature. Many statistics prove that fact. Millions of web users are now online. Thounsand and hundreds of thousands of websites are serving their needs. Still, Bulgarian search engines are nowhere to be seen on the scene….

Currently there are two search engines with their own search bots – www.krasta.com and www.paiak.com.

Krasta.com claims to have indexed 179 192 pages only. Its index has not increased for six months and its bot is showing zero activity. This is in complete contrast to it’s previous behavior. Its official counter shows an average of 300 visitors per day. This engine, a one man project, is not showing any signs of life.

The second one, Paiak.com, has 411 028 pages in its index, as stated on its front page. It is also showing zero spider activity and the number of indexed pages has not changed in the past six months, even though it used to increase its index size on a regular basis. There are no publicly available statistics about the usage of this search engine, but it is even less popular than Krasta.com. This project, released in year 2002 by BG WEB Ltd., also seems like a dead one.

You may already be asking yourself “How is this possible?”. There are two big reasons for this situation:
1.Google
and…
2.portals.

Reason number one – Google: Google is the preferred search engine for most Bulgarian speaking users. Its rivals, Yahoo and MSN, are falling well beyond both in terms of popularity and usage. The reasons for this are complex, but one is visible for all – Google has a Bulgarian language interface. There is also the lack of competition in Bulgarian internet. The development of a search engine, capable of outperforming Google in terms of quality and quantity, would be a great challenge now. Besides, Bulgarian internet market is not big enough to provide the financial background for a search engine of Google’s class at this time.

Reason number two – portals. When it comes to finding information in relatively small quantities of data, portals seem to do the job. There are three very popular web portals in Bulgaria, each offering free registration for all types of websites. The first and the second one in terms of popularity – www.dir.bg and www.gbg.bg are driven by small editorial staffs that are responsible for reviews of submitted sites. Both are offering paid listings as well, which guarantee premium position in directory search results. www.start.bg is a whole another story. It is an editor driven directory like DMOZ. However, there are some crucial differences between them. Start.bg editors are not getting paid directly, but they have the right to publish up to 5 sponsored links and one banner on each of their categories as a compensation for their hard work.

For now the big players in Bulgarian internet – Google and web directories are the first choice of option when it comes to information search. However, there are signs of a possible change in Bulgarian internet climate. www.gbg.bg , also known as Giuvetch, have started showing Google search results for its main search option instead of its directory results nearly an year ago. This means they are not depending on their directory any more. Could this be a sign for the end of Bulgarian directories? It is very questionable given the fact that Start.bg is getting more popular every day, but things are still to happen in Bulgarian internet…

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The Inside Google Sitemaps blog has just announced that Google Sitemaps’ user interface and documentation are now available in ten additional languages. The newly added languages are:

Brazilian Portuguese
Dutch
French
German
Italian
]]> The Inside Google Sitemaps blog has just announced that Google Sitemaps’ user interface and documentation are now available in ten additional languages. The newly added languages are:

Brazilian Portuguese
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Korean
Russian
Simplified Chinese
Spanish
Traditional Chinese

Sitemap submisssion is not limited by the language of the site, as always.

Source: Inside Google Sitemaps

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The Bulgarian country Top Level Domain (TLD) ‘bg’ is registering slow growth in number of active domains in 2005. At the end of August 2005 the number of registered ‘bg’ TLDs is only 4092. The growth rate now is [...]]]> The Bulgarian country Top Level Domain (TLD) ‘bg’ is registering slow growth in number of active domains in 2005. At the end of August 2005 the number of registered ‘bg’ TLDs is only 4092. The growth rate now is a couple domains per day, which is slow, compared to other European countries, and far from enough to catch up with them in the near future. Below is a graphical representation of the change in numbers of registered ‘bg’ TLD from 2000 to 2005.

According to ‘Vitosha Research’ slow registration procedures and high prices offered by the monopolist in ‘bg’ TLD registration ‘Register.BG’ are the main reasons for the slow growth in ‘bg’ TLD registrations. Many Bulgarian companies prefer registering domains like ‘name-bg.com’ instead of ‘name.bg’.

Bulgaria is also falling behind in terms of DNS hosts. Hungary, which is almost the size of Bulgaria in terms of population and internet usage, had almost eight times the Bulgarian DNS hosts in 2004.

Comparison chart of Bulgarian vs. Hungarian DNS hosts:

However, when TLDs com, net, org, info and biz registered by Bulgarian citizens or firms are counted Bulgaria sits comfortably in 39-th place in the world with its 41 480 domains. It is close to Portugal and Taiwan and ahead of Hungary, Ukraine, Greece, Romania and Serbia and Montenegro. The most prefered TLD is ‘.com’. Second by a large margin comes the ‘net’ TLD.

Comparison chart of TLDs, registered by Bulgarian juridical persons and firms (‘bg’ TLD excluded):

Resources:
RIPE
Register.BG
Vitosha Research

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The Bulgarian internet population now reaches 1 800 000 people who account for 24% of the country’s population. The share of internet users has increased by some 50% since last year and the trend continues, fueled by ISPs who now [...]]]> The Bulgarian internet population now reaches 1 800 000 people who account for 24% of the country’s population. The share of internet users has increased by some 50% since last year and the trend continues, fueled by ISPs who now offer faster and cheaper internet access. 2005 marks the shift from dial-up connections (2/3 of connections in 2004) to high-speed LANs and cable networks (2/3 of connections in 2005).

A significant event in Bulgarian internet in 2005 is the massive expansion of ADSL connections. The number of ADSL connections jumped from 10 000 in June 2004 to around 170 000 connections in the middle of year 2005 or 10% of the current internet connections. Currently the only ADSL provider is Bulgaria Telecom (http://www.btc.bg/en/).

Wireless internet is still going nowhere. The main reasons for that are lower quality of the service, compared to other types of access and also the small number of laptops. Other concerns are control of access to those connections and security. Wireless hotspots are slowly emerging in hotels and business centres. Other places you can find wireless hotspots include McDonalds and in some petrol stations.

Current internet connections types and distribution:
Dial-Up and ISDN – 10%
ADSL – 10%
Cable – 30%
UTP-at-Home (LAN) – 50%

Main places for internet access are at home (40%) and at work (28%). Internet clubs and internet cafes come next in third place with 27%.

Bulgarian businesses are using internet more and more actively, but still falls behind their European counterparts. In terms of connectivity it is 10% ahead with nearly 75% of all businesses having an internet connection. The turning point is the way internet is used in Bulgaria and in Western Europe. In 2004, almost 30% of Bulgarian companies had a website, compared to 44% of Western European companies having an online presence in 2003. In 2004 only 1.2% of Bulgarian businesses had some kind of integrated system with their suppliers, compared to 8% in Western Europe in 2003.

The readiness of Small and Medium Businesses (SMB) for e-business is low. Only 14% of SMB have electronic payment cards. Only 2% of SMB made an online B2B purchase in 2004, and even less (1%) made a B2B sell. Nearly 11% of Western European firms have made a B2B deal online in 2003. Only 2-3% of SMB turnover is from e-commerce.

The Bulgarian e-marketing marks a substantial advance in revenue in 2005. In Q1 and Q2 of 2005 there is a 70-80% growth in online marketing spending, compared to the same period in 2004. We can follow this tendency back to 2003, when revenues jumped with 80-90% compared to 2002. A similar picture is present in 2004 where the increase was about 60%.
In 2004 the total revenue from advertising in Bulgaria was 161 million levs (around 100 million USD). Online advertising accounted for 2% of that revenue with 3.22 million levs (around 2 million USD). The current trend is for an increase in online advertising spends, with most of the advertising agencies declaring they have increased budgets for online marketing in year 2005.

Resources:
www.vitosha-research.com – E-Bulgaria 2005 study
www.aresearch.org
www.pressboard.info
www.banker.bg
www.investor.bg
www.scitoma.com

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