The Bazaar, Digitized: Inside Divar and Iran’s Classifieds Economy

Picture how an Iranian sells a car. They do not call a dealer or list with a broker. They open Divar, snap a few photos, write a description, and post the ad for free. Within hours the calls and chats start. They negotiate directly, meet a buyer in person, and the deal is done. No commission, no marketplace in the middle, just two people and a platform that connected them. Now picture that happening with apartments, motorcycles, phones, furniture, even job offers, tens of millions of times a month. That is Divar, and it is arguably the most-used commerce service in the entire country.

In our first piece we mapped Iran’s online economy as three layers and promised the third one, classifieds, deserved its own story. This is that story, and it turns out to be one of the most interesting in Iranian tech. (If you missed it, start with how Iranians actually shop online.)

The quiet giant

The numbers are staggering for a company most people outside Iran have never heard of. By the most recent counts Divar has well over thirty-eight million active users in a country of ninety million. People post more than one hundred and twenty million listings a month and generate something on the order of six billion ad views in the same period. A very large share of the adult population is on Divar, and a meaningful slice of the entire economy’s buying and selling passes through it.

What makes this remarkable is the business it sits on. Classifieds are one of the great quiet business models in tech. The platform holds no inventory, ships nothing, and takes no transaction risk. It simply connects buyers and sellers and monetizes attention, through promoted and bumped listings, vertical ads, and value-added services. It is capital-light, high-margin, and astonishingly sticky, because the value compounds: people go where the listings are, and listings go where the people are. Once a classifieds platform wins a market, it is extraordinarily hard to dislodge.

The tell: selling the app store to keep the classifieds

Here is the detail that tells you how valuable this really is. Divar belongs to Hezardastan, one of Iran’s most important technology groups and the company that originally built Cafe Bazaar, the country’s dominant Android app store, out of which Divar itself was spun. For years those two were the crown jewels of the same house.

Then, in early 2025, Hezardastan did something revealing. It sold Cafe Bazaar, a famous, profitable, market-leading app store, to Tapsell, Iran’s big mobile-advertising network, and chose to concentrate its energy on Divar. Given the choice between the country’s leading app store and its leading classifieds platform, the group kept the classifieds. That is the clearest possible signal of where the smart money sees the long-term value: not in distributing other people’s apps, but in owning the marketplace where a nation trades with itself.

Divar versus the rest

As with so much of Iranian tech, the market has a giant and a distant second. Sheypoor is the long-standing number two in general classifieds, a real and capable company, but it operates at a fraction of Divar’s scale. It is the same lopsided pattern we keep finding, Snapp towering over Tapsi in ride-hailing, Digikala over everyone in e-commerce, and here Divar over Sheypoor.

Around the generalists sits a layer of specialists. Bama is the go-to vertical for cars, with deep, structured automotive listings. The job market has its own cluster, with Jobinja, Jobvision, and Iran Talent competing to be the place Iranians find work. These verticals matter because they are where classifieds make their best money: a focused category like autos or recruitment supports richer data, better tools, and higher-value advertising than a general board ever could.

What the listings reveal

Now the part that connects to everything Tehran Index cares about. A classifieds platform is, without trying to be, one of the most honest economic sensors a country has. Digikala shows you what people buy new. Divar shows you what they sell, trade, and let go of, which in a pressured economy is often the more revealing signal.

When a currency slides, classifieds light up. People sell the second car, list the spare phone, rent out the extra room, trade down on appliances, and hunt for a better job. The flow of listings across categories is a near-real-time read on household stress, the property market, the used-car market, and the labor market all at once. Divar’s real-estate data alone is so comprehensive that researchers have built public datasets from it. This is exactly the kind of proprietary, structured signal that the outside world cannot see and that we exist to make legible. It is also why the category draws state attention: Divar’s real-estate vertical has at times come under government pressure over how housing is listed and priced, the price of being genuinely important. We note that as context, not alarm.

The global benchmark

Step outside Iran and the model is familiar, but Divar is arguably a better version of it. In the United States, Craigslist proved decades ago how powerful and profitable classifieds can be, then famously froze in time, barely changing its design for twenty years. In Europe and the emerging markets, the category evolved instead into slick, app-first, vertical-led businesses, OLX, Avito, and the portfolios of groups like Adevinta and Schibsted, which turned cars, property, and jobs into dedicated platforms worth billions. Divar belongs firmly in that second, modern camp, except that it built all of it inside a sanctioned, isolated market, with no foreign capital or foreign competitor in sight. Craigslist had America to itself by being first. Divar has Iran to itself by being better, and by being local at a moment when no global player can enter.

The catch, and the optimistic read

Monetizing classifieds in a low-income, inflation-squeezed economy is delicate, push fees too hard and users post elsewhere, so revenue per listing stays modest. Regulatory attention, especially on housing, is a live factor. And like every Iranian platform, Divar runs on domestic rails and lives with the rial’s swings. But the core asset is close to unassailable: a classifieds network with this much of a population on it, this much data, and this little real competition is one of the most defensible positions in the entire economy.

Divar has already won the hardest thing to win, the network, and it sits on a capital-light, high-margin model with a vast and loyal user base. Classifieds are counter-cyclical in a useful way: when times are hard, people trade more, not less. The growth runway is proven elsewhere, deeper verticals in autos, property, and jobs, paid value-added services, smarter matching, and eventually transactional layers on top. And the live, structured map of what an entire nation is buying, selling, renting, and earning may be the most valuable part of all. The company that owns it chose it over a famous app store. That should tell you something. It is the layer Tehran Index exists to make legible: not just that Iran has its own Craigslist, but that it built a modern, dominant, data-rich classifieds platform that quietly became one of the most important companies in the country, while almost no one outside was paying attention.

Classifieds are one layer of three. For the whole picture, see our field guide to Iran’s digital economy.