Advertising in the Maldives, and what you get for the money.

There are not many ways to reach people in this country, and most of them cannot tell you whether they worked. Here is an honest look at each one — including ours, and where ours is the wrong choice.

Who you are actually trying to reach

The first thing worth separating is the two audiences that share these islands. Around half a million people live here; a much larger number arrive, stay on a resort island, and leave. Advertising aimed at visitors is bought overseas, months before they travel, and almost none of it happens on Maldivian media.

If you sell to people who live here — a shop, a clinic, a hardware supplier, a café, a bank, a phone plan, a college — then the audience you want is small, concentrated, and reachable. Nearly everyone is on a phone. That is the whole opportunity, and the whole difficulty: everybody is competing for the same attention on the same screen.

The options, honestly

Billboards and printed hoardings

Good for one thing: being unmissable in one place. A board on a busy Malé road is seen by everyone who passes it, which is a real and valuable thing. What it cannot do is tell you how many of them looked, who they were, or whether any of them acted. You buy a position and a period of time, and you take the rest on faith. It also reaches the road it stands on, not the country.

Radio and television

Still genuinely effective for broad awareness, particularly for older audiences and during Ramadan and major national moments. The trade is the same as the billboard: you buy a slot, and afterwards you have an invoice rather than a number. Production costs money and time before a single person has heard it.

Newspapers and news websites

Local news sites carry serious daily traffic, and a banner there puts you beside content people came for deliberately. Ask for the numbers before you buy — impressions and click rates — because a display banner's honest click rate is usually under one percent, and a site that will not share the figure is telling you something.

Facebook and Instagram

This is where most Maldivian advertising money now goes, and for sound reasons: the targeting is real, the measurement is real, and you can start with very little. Two things are worth knowing. Your competitors are all there too, so you are bidding against them for the same eyes. And the attention is shallow — your advertisement appears between a friend's photograph and a video, and is scrolled past in under a second by someone who did not want to see it.

Sponsorship and giveaways

Sponsoring an event, a team, or a prize buys something the others do not: goodwill, and a reason for people to say your name out loud. It is also the hardest to measure, and the easiest to overspend on because it feels good.

Where Isthihaaru fits

We built Isthihaaru because of the shallow-attention problem. It is a wall of cards, each one a Maldivian business. People come to turn the cards over, because prizes are hidden behind some of them and drop at random through the day. Your product is on the front of a card; the reason to care about it is on the back.

The difference from every option above is not the price. It is that nobody is interrupted. People arrive wanting to turn cards, and turning your card is the thing they came to do. And because it is a website rather than a board or a broadcast, every appearance, every turn and every click is recorded against your business — so at the end of the month you get figures, not an impression of how it went.

What it costs

Our packages start at MVR 600 per month and the full list is on the pricing page. Prices are a starting point rather than a rate card — if a package is close but not right for your budget or your season, say so and we will find something that works.

There is also a giveaway partner place that costs nothing: you provide a prize — a meal, a voucher, a product — and your name appears beside it on the wall and on the winner's claim. It is the cheapest way to find out how this audience responds to you before committing to anything.

Questions worth asking any advertising seller

• How many people will see this, and how do you know that number?
• How many of them will be people who could actually buy from me?
• What will you be able to tell me at the end of the month that you cannot tell me now?
• What happens if it does not work — am I committed for a year?

We answer those on the FAQ page, including the ones where the answer is not flattering to us.