What’s your say on ad banners on Indian blogs ?
While a storm brews in the US blogosphere on a controversial ad campaign from Microsoft, the second session at IAMAI’s Web 2.0 conference touched upon the topic of using blogs as a marketing tool in the Indian market (If you do not have the time or patience to sit through the 1 1/2 hour video, catch a brief summary at ContentSutra).
A couple of panelists, including Garima from Citibank, were of the opinion that ad banners on blogs were a bad idea. The rationale being that advertising on blogs disrupts the sanctity and integrity of blogs.
I strongly disagree. Majority of the Indian blogs already use Adsense as part of their blogs and as long as bloggers have a disclosure policy, I think ad banners on blogs are perfectly acceptable.
What do other Indian bloggers feel about this ? Also, as part of the blog audience, what do you think about this ? Should blogs have ad banners ?
MIH’s acquisition strategy is to acquire technology
AgencyFaqs has an interview cum story on MIH owned portal Ibibo and the myriad services under the Ibibo umbrella. Amongst other things, they discuss about the 1.5 crore incentive by Ibibo to attract bloggers to their platform. Ashish Kashyap, MIH, defends the initiative and claims that they are attracting 1000 bloggers per month to the Ibibo platform. He also adds that they now verify the authenticity of the blogs to prevent abuse. The company is working on a ‘knowledge search’ initiative - whatever that means..
Talking about acquisitions, he mentions that their focus will be on online companies with the goal of acquiring ‘technology’.
On a side note, check out their job listing for Head, Merger and Acquisition at Alootechie.
One question I’d like to have seen answered is about the NSFW content on Pixrat. MIH was supposed to weed out the NSFW content at the time of the Pixrat acquisition. But thus far, looks like it hasnt happened.
Entire story here.
Rediff announces Blog Showcase
At the Pune Blogcamp event, Rediff announced the launch of Rediff Blog Showcase, a platform for bloggers to showcase their posts. Each time a blog is updated, their posts will get featured on Rediff Blog Showcase, which will then be voted by the readers using a Digg like voting system. Readers will also be able to comment on the posts.
Currently, the service is invite only and you can request an invite on their website above. The site will go live in two weeks and as of now, there isnt a business model around the site.
via AgencyFaqs
India Internet statistics
IAMAI claims there are 37 million ‘ever user’ Internet users and 25 million ‘active users’ in India at end of September 2006.
JuxtConsult’s recently released ‘India Online 2007′ pegs Indian Internet user base at 30.32 million. 83% (approx 25 million) are ‘active users’. Of the 25 million ‘active users’, 20 million access the Internet every day.
active user ~ a user who logs on to the Internet at least once in 30 days.
So, if someone was looking for accurate estimates on Internet usage in India, which report is to be believed ?
The ‘ever user’ metric is crap and the ‘active user’ isnt convincing enough to me.
The TRAI report seems to be much more convincing and reliable. As per the report, there are 8.582 million Internet subscribers of which, the broadband subscriber base stands at 2.054 million.
Part two of the India Online 2007 report
In an earlier post, I summarized key points from the first part of the ‘India Online 2007′ report by JuxtConsult. Some interesting points from the second installment of the series:
- E-commerce in India reached Rs. 2300 crores
- 10.8 million or 43% of the total Internet population shopped online - an increase of 76% YoY
- Online travel booking seems to be the biggest e-commerce activity. 84% of the 10.8 million shoppers have booked their travel online at least once
- The 10 most popular activities include email, IM, chatting, e-greetings, dating (What ??), news, sports, music, games
- Fastest growing online activites include social networking (one third of Internet users use social networking) and online matrimony
- 27% of Indian Internet population read blogs, 15% comment on blogs and 7% write a blog themselves
I guess I’m too nerdy to accept and realize that chatting and e-greetings are still some of the most popular activities online.
via ET
The Indian Income Tax department now has a blog
Yes. You read it right. In an effort to seek answers to the following questions:
- How can Income Tax Dept. function more efficiently
- How can Income Tax Dept. serve tax payers better
- How can Income Tax Dept. maximize tax collection revisions
the IT department has started a blog. The objective being to capture and solicit feedback and views from the tax payers. The site also makes it clear that queries related to tax woes from users will not be entertained on the blog. The blog is solely for the purpose of connecting with the end users.
While this is a brilliant effort towards openness and embracing emerging technologies, it has been my observation that a lot of Indian internet users fail to understand what a blog is. And tend to misinterpret a blog as the actual service provider itself.
Take Kamla’s blog for example. Other examples include ContentSutra’s post on ringtones from K-soaps provided by Idea Cellular and finally my own post on Moser Baer video. The ITD will have a tough time keeping people from posting about their tax problems on the blog itself.
None the less, kudos to the IT department for taking such a big step forward.
via FE.
AOL India launches cricket, news and bollywood related blogs
The recently launched AOL India portal has launched blogs in three niche categories - Cricket, News and Bollywood. No, its not a blogging platform. Instead, the blogging initiative comprises of posts submitted by a select group of authors. It isnt clear if AOL is paying the bloggers for the content generation. If you are interested, you can send in your post to blogseditor@aol.com (Not aol.in, mind you).
The site does a poor job in terms of usability and content is at best okay. For instance, why do they have a Brazilian blogger submitting news content related to Brazil on the News blog ? This is supposed to be an Indian portal, isnt it ?
Bursts of plagiarism in India
A couple of days back, Dr. Arunachalam Kumar, a Sulekha blogger, reported on how his blog posts were being plagiarized word-to-word on IBibo blogs. A few weeks back, there was a similar incident where a movie review was plagiarized in a newspaper (I cant recall which paper it was..If anyone can recall this, please let me know).
Now, just a few days later, a reporter for Mid-Day Bangalore, Sunanya Suresh, seems to have lifted WATBlog’s post about Chintee.com (the news about Reliance’s Chintee.com was originally broken here on startupdunia) word-to-word and without any proper attribution.
Yes, as a blogger, I often link to stories and articles in newspapers and other magazines. But with the necessary attribution.
Not providing the due credit is like claiming the work to be your own - which is ethically, morally and legally (blog posts are copyright of the respective bloggers).
Some interesting tidbits from Indian online world
A story in Financial Express explains the online promotion of the movie Metro on Shaadi.com.
No, this post isnt about this promo. A couple of other bits in the story caught my eye:
1) Revenue through Desktop TV for MSN India has reached $40K per month, a 250% YoY increase. Number of advertisers jumped from 65 in 2005 to 260 today.
Hmm…pretty interesting…I think Rediff is a bigger portal in terms of market share and pageviews than MSN India. As per Rediff’s earnings report early today, they had 177 advertisers. While MSN India had 260 advertisers ? That’s almost 80 more advertisers !!!
2) Multiplexes account for 60 - 70% of all ticket sales. For PVR Cinemas, one of the leading multiplex players, 17 - 18% of their ticket bookings happens at the PVR website.
Full story in FE.
iBibo changes gears, launches ibQash
Ibibo’s 1.5 crore Great Blogger Hunt managed to generate a lot of buzz, criticism and very likely, a huge chunk of traffic. However, as suspected, they failed to attract and generate good quality content. Looks like they’ve decided its time to scrap their contest and change the rules of the game, so that emphasis is placed on the quality of blog posts as well.
They’ve introduced ibQash, a program where you get rewarded based on which league you end up in. The quality of blogs will be the key factor affecting this decision. To quote from their website:
An independent audit of quality will be conducted, with a premium on originality and relevance. This will be applied to every blog.
Independent audit of quality - does it mean audit by an independent agency ? This is unclear and seems to be open to distortion and misinterpretation.
This problem of bad quality UGC is not specific to Ibibo only. A lot of India specific sites, including the heavily publicized Zapak, are plagued with such bad quality UGC.
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