The first online car ad in Spain

In 1999, when Google had only just appeared and print still ruled, Gerardo Cabañas launched AutoScout24 in Spain: what he still regards as the country’s first online car classifieds platform. In episode #6 of the Veiko podcast, he traces that story to a question dealers still face today: how do you work with portals without ending up working for them?

Cabañas ran AutoScout24 for 19 years and coches.com for another 7. He also sat on the board of GANVAM, Spain’s vehicle dealers’ association, including a brief spell as president. He now works as a consultant. The conversation was recorded at Gil Automoción, with support from Elisa Gil and the Movento Madrid team.

What was the first online car ad in Spain?

In 1999, Gerardo Cabañas opened AutoScout24’s Spanish operation and still considers it the country’s first online car classified. It did not begin with a grand technology forecast: a German contact needed someone to develop the Spanish market, the proposal appealed to him, and he went on to run the company for 19 years.

To understand the challenge, picture the office at the time. The internet lived inside a desktop PC and the modem occupied the phone line: while you browsed, nobody could call. Mobile phones made calls and sent text messages; they did not photograph vehicles. Presenting the portal to a dealer meant carrying a laptop that weighed several kilos.

Once there, you had to find a connection. The only analogue line available was often attached to the reception fax. You unplugged it, connected the modem and waited for the metallic noise to become a live connection. The scene captures the gap between the idea and its execution: listing cars online began, quite literally, by looking for a spare phone line.

People found those listings differently too. Cabañas remembers Yahoo as a common homepage and AltaVista Magallanes as the leading search engine. In Spain, Olé was eventually folded into Terra, one of the local symbols of the dot-com boom and bust. Google existed, but it had not yet come to dominate search.

With few competing projects and almost no dealers running their own websites, a generic search for “car” could surface the portal easily. Attracting the buyer was not the hardest part. The real obstacle was persuading advertisers to hand over their stock and then pay to list it.

How cars were advertised before the internet

Before portals, selling a car meant finding space on paper. Daily newspapers filled pages with classified ads, especially on Sundays. They sat alongside regional titles devoted entirely to listings—Segunda Mano in Madrid, Cambalache in Seville and Primera Mano in Barcelona—and specialist magazines. Autocasión also began life as a print publication.

The medium set the rules. An edition could not hold 100,000 vehicles, so the market remained local and listings were arranged by brand or price. Days also passed between the editorial deadline and the paper reaching a newsstand. Some cars had already sold by the time the phone started ringing, yet their ads stayed in circulation.

A private seller submitted a few lines of text. A professional bought half a page or a full page, displayed 10 or 20 cars and finished with a promise: “more than 200 cars in stock”. The aim was not to show the entire inventory. It was to prompt a call asking, “Do you have anything between this price and that one?”

The Yellow Pages solved a different problem. They helped someone find a business, not a particular Ford Fiesta. Online classifieds reversed that journey: the car appears first, and only then does the buyer choose whom to buy it from. It sounds like a simple change, but it reordered the relationship between product, customer and seller.

The classified model has not changed in 30 years

AutoScout24 launched in Spain with a tariff set, in Cabañas’s words, “by gut feel”: 9,900 pesetas a month—about 59 euros—to advertise up to 25 or 30 cars. It borrowed the logic of print: a dealer pays for visibility, the portal supplies demand, and that demand can become enquiries and sales if the vehicle and price are right.

There was no benchmark. The team had to put a price on a new service and then persuade somebody to trust it. Cabañas says the essence of that offer barely changed between 1999 and his departure from AutoScout24 in 2018, and that today’s model remains much the same.

The publishing process, however, is unrecognisable. The office used to receive handwritten stock lists by fax: “Ford Fiesta for sale, this mileage, this many pesetas”. Someone typed them up. Photographs followed a separate journey: analogue camera, film development, registration number written on the back, stamp, envelope and ordinary post. On arrival, they were scanned and uploaded.

Ten or 15 days could pass between taking the picture and seeing the live listing. Even with that delay, the internet was faster than magazines that published monthly. The first dealers to take the chance tended to be younger, were enjoying good years in the trade and could reserve a small slice of their budget to test something new.

Not everyone shared their enthusiasm. Some saw Cabañas as a young man heading for a hard fall. One person even advised him to find an honest living. The story is funny now, but it shows how strange charging dealers to put cars on the internet once sounded.

Since then, the industry has tested pay-per-lead models and formulas closer to the transaction. Cabañas has taken part in several attempts and describes the difficulty plainly: everyone at international automotive-classified forums wants to move closer to the sale, but in his view nobody has yet found a formula the industry accepts as definitive.

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Do dealers work with the platforms or for them?

Cabañas prefers to think that dealers work with the platforms. To him, a portal is a traffic tool, much like a well-positioned physical forecourt. An established business with its own website and direct visitors can reduce its dependence; a newcomer needs greater portal support while it builds a brand and channels of its own.

The feeling of working for a portal appears when the monthly invoice seems to swallow the margin on a sale. Cabañas suggests reframing the question: rather than arguing about portals in the abstract, measure what each one delivers. In his example, a small or medium dealer has 20 cars and a marketing budget of 100 euros. On day one, he would put almost all of it into the major portals.

But he would not spend blindly. He would request proposals, negotiate and, from the following day, record enquiries and calls by portal. Traffic generated by the premises counts too: the frontage, lighting and location are part of the commercial investment, even if attributing their return is harder.

Channel diversification comes next. If every sale depends on paying a third party, the business is in somebody else’s hands. Cabañas mentions billboards, support for the local team, radio, social media, the dealer’s own website and previous customers. He offers no magic split; the aim is to prevent any single channel from holding too much power.

He also asks dealers to look beyond direct enquiries. Thousands of people may see a car and remember the seller’s name without filling in a form, just as they might notice a billboard. That exposure has value, even if attribution remains unfinished business.

The idea fits the way an agile professional operates: combine portals with owned channels and find another outlet when a unit stops turning. Podcast episode #1 already explored that link between saleable stock and turnover. Veiko auctions run from Wednesday to Friday and are open to trade buyers only.

Six platforms for selling cars, according to Gerardo

When Rodrigo asks for a ranking, Cabañas adds a warning: the answer changes with the size of the business, the time available and the chosen metric. Maximising enquiry volume is not the same as maximising return on spend. With those caveats, he ranks the six platforms for professionals as follows:

1. Coches.net. He places it clearly first for traffic and results. He also warns about its higher cost: dealers need to monitor spend so they do not end up working for the portal.
2. AutoScout24. He gives it second place for spontaneous organic traffic. Combined with Autocasión within Sumauto, the group would rank second in the market.
3. Milanuncios. It may generate more enquiries than other options, but of lower quality when the measure is a completed sale. He would drop it to sixth for luxury cars; it can work better for more affordable vehicles.
4. Wallapop. Its origins as a consumer marketplace make professional use awkward. The internal chat, he says, does not fit a dealership’s workflow well.
5. Coches.com. He puts it behind Wallapop, despite having run the portal for seven years.
6. Autocasión. It ranks sixth when separated from AutoScout24. By group, Adevinta—Coches.net and Milanuncios—would be the aggregated number one.

Cabañas also says the trick of gaining position by reposting the newest ad is over: visibility is becoming less spontaneous and more dependent on payment. What the dealer still controls is the quality of the listing—how many photos it contains, what they show, whether video is included, how clearly equipment is described and what service follows the handover.

That is where reviews matter. A car may develop a fault; what the next buyer will read is whether the seller responded, repaired it and avoided excuses. Presenting a vehicle well no longer sets a business apart. It is the minimum required to compete. Anyone below that standard begins the race from behind.

Episode FAQ

Are social networks a real alternative to car portals?

Yes, but Cabañas sees them as a medium- to long-term investment that requires strategy, budget and continuity. Their main role is to build a brand and direct people towards the website or premises. A reel about one Seat Ibiza expires when that unit sells; a portal connects the listing with people already looking for a car.

That is why, if he had to allocate the first 100 or 1,000 euros, he would put the money into portals rather than social media. Social would follow once the business could maintain a consistent presence and benefit from it beyond a single sale.

Cut the price or boost a car that will not sell?

Both options exist, and neither solves the problem by itself. Boosting a stalled unit means paying more to display the least appealing part of the stock. Cutting the price reduces margin. Cabañas cites a UK practice: if the car has not sold within 30 days, it goes back to auction, whether that produces a profit or a loss.

Before that point, the dealer can adjust the margin or strengthen the listing. What matters is taking action. Waiting 60, 90 or 120 days would be the last resort. It is the same logic behind a dynamic pricing strategy and stock optimisation: time carries a cost too.

Could the portals start selling their own cars?

They could, but they would no longer be the same business. A portal’s strength lies in bringing together broad and varied stock. Buyers arrive to compare, reject options by price, colour or mileage, and finish with two or three candidates. A platform showing only its own vehicles would lose much of that appeal.

Even a suitable car may not sell if it appears as the only choice. Comparison is not an accidental obstacle created by the portal; it is part of the value the portal gives the buyer.

What must a professional do to stay competitive?

Cabañas does not ask dealers to look five years ahead, but at the final four months of the year. He describes a market with excess stock at high prices, new Chinese brands, attractively priced used examples of those brands after the summer, and a proposed consumer-credit law that could affect finance commissions.

He also links SEO to large language models—ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude—and believes businesses will eventually pay to appear in them. He sees dynamic pricing, as used by hotels or platforms such as Uber, as healthy, although he says the industry still lacks a layer capable of combining demand and price across every channel.

His forecast is not that used cars will stop selling. If anything, more may be sold. The unanswered question is who will sell them. That is the thought that closes the episode: accept uncertainty as a travelling companion and turn it into an opportunity. Anyone still following a 30-year-old playbook may find that the next major shift takes months, not decades.