Yes thats right apparently the new website for Tunisia (long overdue) which is a mixture of public and private investment Tunizie.com?? is apparently going to cost 15,000,000 dollars to build over 5 years. I now understand why nobody was interested in helping me (for free lol).
The project budget is reported by webmanagercenter.com
Now if this is true I am well and truly shocked since
- Thats a lot of money a hell of a lot
- How the hell are they going to get that money back?
- Its a new domain and website
- Tunizie.com is a strange domain name I mean where is Tunizie? There are so few searches for Tunizie I cannot even get a volume figure for it.
Now I am a little confused since they could have made me an offer for Tunisia.com and had a running start for this kind of money? Also having worked in a web agency and built websites for large companies this kind of money is a lot and one can only assume they are going to blow a a lot on advertising.
I can only assume that the money is going on building a back end system and making (i say making as that is what is required) tourism professionals register on it and sell their products online.
Feasibility
Now I don’t want to spoil the party but I have spent a bit of money on Tunisia.com and I am quite well ranked for the term Tunisia and starting to rank well for Tunisie/french longtail terms even though its early days. I can tell you now there is probably not enough Tunisia related traffic to make a return on 15,000,0000 dollars (unless you totally dominate online holiday bookings). Also the site is Tunisia not funny videos business news etc ect
Now they say that they are going to get 60,000 > 150,000 per day thats 1,800,000 to 4,500,000 million visitors a month.
Tunisia.com is first page of google for many terms+years old+thousands of pages+Tunisia is a keyword and we get 35-50,000 people per month.
So in essence this new website is right off going to get more than 36 times more traffic than Tunisia.com?????
For other terms its even worse they have to take on people like lonely planet, expedia, lastminute.com, tui etc etc. I know that they have great staff that have been doing the seo/online marketing for years. That is also not mentioning that given a choice will customers from France book with a french agency (with french accreditations) or a Tunisian company?
I smell a lot of PPC and offline advertising a lot especially during the first 2 years. Weather that will be enough for 3 million euros to be returned with profit I do not know but my guess no chance.
Summary
I wish the Tunizie.com website good luck since as one of my online marketing friends informed me “your going to get a lot of people come to your site looking for tunizie.com” which is lovely :-)
Also they are going to raise the rates on PPC also which again is wonderful news for Tunisia.com. Also anything that raises the online buzz for Tunisia has to be a good thing!
However I hope that the 15,000,000 figure is chest pumping since it does need money thrown at it but not this much. Also since working in Tunisia we have wonderful companies such as Traveltodo and Cyberesa who I am sure could have come together to develop a platform for less money since they already have one. Make participation mediatory build the website put them together and you can then proceed for a fraction of 15,000,000 dollars.
If I was those companies I would be saying hey are we invisible!
Anyhow getting everyone online is a wonderful thing and this announcement will shake things up and maybe you will see partnerships forming and other projects start in response.
;-)
But they wont cost 15,000,000 dollars thats for sure!
