StartupDunia

In an interview with AgencyFaqs, Manish Agarwal, VP Marketing for Rediff, talks about the Indian Internet landscape, some of the challenges to Internet penetration and finally, some of the efforts Rediff is taking in the mobile VAS and Web 2.0 areas.

Some interesting tidbits -
In a question about the role of ad networks in India, Manish says -

What’s happening is that ad networks are playing a good role in creating a long tail. There are networks, for example, like Komli and Tribal Fusion, which are doing a good job. For example, Tribal Fusion has the USP of working with niche sites, it helps in targeting a very savvy and niche audience. It helps advertisers in planning their ad campaigns beyond Rediff or Yahoo. There are clients who look for that kind of audience. Whereas for us, it would be more of carpet bombing.

Responding to a question on whether there are sufficient publishers (websites) in India,

That’s what it seems like. If the number of publishers increases, more content will be created. As Ajit (Balakrishnan, Rediff’s CEO) rightly says, more publishers are the key to the growth of the industry. For example, we keep hearing about the advent of local languages on the internet. That can only happen when there is published content in the languages.

Finally, he also touches upon the topic of the actual number of Internet users in India. The IAMAI report (PDF) is pretty confusing in terms of ‘active Internet users’, ‘ever Internet users’ etc.

Read the entire interview here.

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