26 March 2023

Austria's largest digital marketplace 'Willhaben' launched for its range of pre-loved fashion new campaign with focus on more conscious and sustainable purchasing decisions

The marketplace Willhaben.at is Austria's most successful online offer in regard to page impressions (1,365,718,754 page impressions in February 2023). The usage statistics are collected by the official Austrian web analysis, the Österreichische Webanalyse (ÖWA), with a focus on the reach of media offers (websites, apps) in the Austrian market for the provision of data for online advertising. In February, Willhaben once again overtook orf.at of the Austrian public broadcaster ORF in terms of page impressions. When it comes to unique users, unique clients or visits, the ORF's journalistic offering on orf.at is still in pole position, relegating Willhaben to second place. Austrian fashion magazines don't appear in the top rankings (page views, visits,...) of the ÖWA statistics for February. To give an impression of the dimensions: Fashion.at is an internationally visited magazine - about 80 to 90% of the traffic wouldn't be interesting for the ÖWA reach numbers (in February, 9.3% of the visitors came from Austria; statistics from Google Analytics). And even when other countries would be included, Fashion.at's traffic would still be far from the mega page view and visit numbers of Willhaben.

The advertising market is highly competitive, and the ÖWA measurement does not differentiate between marketplaces or journalistic publications when counting the amount of expected traffic for advertisements. With brands such as the daily newspaper 'Die Presse' or the lifestyle magazine 'miss', the Styria Media Group is a heavyweight in the Austrian media landscape. At the end of last year, the group announced the closure of two of its magazines, 'Diva' and 'Wienerin' (article by Wiener Zeitung). Both were among the most popular in the country's fashion industry. In February, the Styria Media Group published the news to continue the publication of 'Wienerin' (means 'Viennese') from April, directed in the beginning from Innsbruck, the capital of Tyrol. It's very likely that the new 'Wienerin' team won't be able to match the page view success of the Willhaben marketplace, which even the ORF can't win. But it's a positive sign that in the tense situation of the media market with numerous closures of newspapers, magazines and job cuts, a journalistic medium dedicated to women and the metropolitan lifestyle of the Austrian capital will continue to exist.

Recently, the Styria Media Group's 'Willhaben' presented the latest results of the research on the use of the marketplace, in particular which labels and pieces of clothing users searched for between calendar week 7 and 10, and the new campaign with the slogan 'Wer fesch sein will, willhaben', which focuses on a more sustainable lifestyle in terms of consumption. The slogan is a play on words with the brand name and expresses that the way to become smart and chic is to buy fashion from Willhaben. The campaign was launched on 21 March with a landing page on willhaben.at/will/feschsein where categories such as dresses, blazers, bags, sunglasses... are visualized with images of fresh spring and summer styled looks of fashion, shoes, accessories accompanied by short teaser texts mentioning several popular label names and the amount of current offers such as 170,000 dresses for the spring look (fast checked today). Each of the category links leads to the marketplace with a pre-filter to find directly what's announced on the landing page. Easy navigation, clear and practical. No wonder that over the years since its foundation in 2006, Willhaben has developed into the largest digital marketplace in the country with offers in the areas of fashion, but also other categories such as real estate or cars and motors, that it reaches large parts of the Austrian population.

Photo: © Willhaben.