StartupDunia

Two interesting stories related to the Indian online advertising market:

1) Business Today has a good story covering the full spectrum of digital advertising companies in India - from full fledge interactive agencies to online Indian ad networks.

Most interesting tidbit from the story:

* As per a Lintas media report, Internet advertising in India is Rs 215 crores ( a 43% Y-o-Y growth)
* Possibility of the market growing to Rs 2500 crores by 2011
* Current mobile advertising in India is Rs 40 crores, expected to grow to Rs 500 crores by 2011

You can read the entire story here.

2) ContentSutra has another story on figures released by FICCI, which puts the Indian online advertising market at Rs 270 crores, a 69% Y-o-Y growth. Online advertising was just 1.3 % of total Entertainment & Media advertising in 2007.

If you take the average of both figures, it puts the Indian online advertising market at Rs 242.5 crores.

Compare this to an estimate released by Starcom MediaVest Group in April 2007 which put the Indian online advertising market at Rs 225 crores.

Despite the fact that the Indian online population is small, they have latched onto social media pretty early. Social networking sites and blogs are the most popular forms of social media, with a large following from the Indian online audience.

• As of June last year, Orkut had 7.2 million unique visitors from India. Facebook had 0.78 million unique visitors, with a month over month surge of a whopping 230% (via AgencyFaqs)

• Assuming that India has 24 million Internet users, this means that about 30% of the Indian Internet users have used Orkut.

• Blogs have turned out to be shockingly popular - 85% of the online Indian users read blog

• Thats almost 20 million Indian Internet users

So, when it comes to digital marketing in India, are Indian marketers warming up to the social media phenomenon ?

In this multi-part series, I’m planning to pick each of the five channels (Orkut, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, brand websites) and discuss various marketing initiatives by Indian companies in each channel.

Advertising - Marketing on Orkut:

Several Indian companies were advertising on Orkut via AdWords, which Google had integrated into Orkut a short while ago. However, rising problems, mainly cultural, forced Google to remove ads from Orkut.

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While reading ContentSutra the other day, I noticed the TravelGuru banner on the right sidebar. And couldnt help wondering how out of context the banner was - in terms of time.

Time based contextual ad campaigns are effective - but only at the relevant time. Outside of the time window, they hardly make sense. Just like this one. I guess, TravelGuru took the easy way out.

Microsoft has launched its digital advertising platform in India. India is the only country outside of US, where the company has launched the service.

As per Rajnish, India head, MS Digital Advertising Solutions, “The total advertising market in India is of $5 billion. But the online advertising market is still minuscule. We find there is enough scope (for growth).We expect the online advertising market to capture two to three per cent of the total advertising market in as many years.”

BollywoodHungama, Equity Master, HDFC Securities and Facebook have been roped in for the launch. NDTV Media is the exclusive sales partner for Microsoft. I’m not sure if outsourcing the ad sales to an outside entity is such a good idea. A similar attempt by Sify last year, already flopped. (Update: I missed out that the MSN-NDTV relationship has been in place for some time now).

As per NDTV Media COO, Niraj Dutt, they plan to have 750 advertisers on the platform by end of the calendar year.

Hmm..Rediff could rope in only 230 advertisers in the last quarter - do you think 750 is an achievable target till the rest of the year ?

via ET

Rediff just announced their Q2 (quarter ending Sept 30 2007) earnings report. Some key highlights:

* Revenues for quarter totaled $7.86 million, increase of 18% YoY

* Indian online revenues totaled $5.73 million, an increase of 22% while US publishing revenues totaled $2.13 million, increase of 9%

* Although revenue shot up, net income was $0.89 million as compared to $1.5 million for the same quarter last year - about 40% drop

* # of registered users reached 59.8 million - a 25% increase compared to last year

* 190 companies advertised on Rediff. Top 10 of those contributed 45% of the online revenue, compared to 57% last year.

The company is currently beta testing Rediff Language Search in 8 Indian languages. Users will be able to search in the language of their choice using this service.

via release

You hardly see an Internet website advertising on the TV in the US. After all, both are competing marketing channels - and the Internet is considered to be the emerging medium, giving TV a run for its money.

But apparently, the scenario is quite contrary in India.

TV advertising has become one of the preferred ways for Indian Internet websites to extend their reach. TV advertising of the Internet portals registered a growth of 190 per cent during January-August 2007 as compared to the same period in 2006 as per a latest report by AdEx India, a division of TAM Media. The number of Internet portals advertising on TV increased from 82 in January-August 2006 to 143 in January-August 2007.

www.Homeshop18.com, www.cleartrip.com, www.indiatimes.com, www.yatra.com, www.zapak.com, www.timesjobs.com, www.makemytrip.com, www.monster.com etc are some  of the leading Internet websites advertising on TV.

via BS

Quite interesting, but an unfortunate trend.

I mean, all these are the big portals - some with deep pockets, others with significant venture funding. And if they have to rely on TV advertisements, what does that translate into for the smaller startups ? Very few of the startups will be able to afford TV advertising, even if they are venture funded.  Besides, if the startup relies on advertising as a revenue generator, how would it be able to rope in advertisers if the startup itself, chooses to advertise on TV.  I mean, you gotta drink your own kool-aid, right ?

IAMAI is organizing a Digital Marketing Conference tomorrow.  The conference is titled ‘Wake up and Smell the Coffee’ with the objective of taking a hard look and rethinking your perception of digital advertising.

You can watch the live webcast here.

While WPP registered only a low single digit growth in the developed markets (5.1% in North America, 3.1% in Europe and just 2.3% in the UK), it grew by a whopping 29% in China and 22% in India as per the first half results announced by the agency.

On a separate note, G2, owned by WPP,  is close to acquiring three small to medium agencies in the digital marketing space in India.

A testament to how strong the advertising industry (including online-digital advertising) are growing in India.

Probably not one of the best examples of targeted advertising. But none the less, I was quite surprised to find Yatra banner ads on TechCrunch. The ad seemed to appear as part of the TribalFusion ad network. Wonder if this was intented or just a fluke.

Yahoo India announced that it has acquired a 35% - 50% in online ad network company Tyroo. Tyroo is part of the Smile Interactive
Technologies Group (Smile Group). The cash infusion by Yahoo! will be used to invest aggressively in technology and sales network to reach out to the vast number of small and medium sized advertisers and publishers in India. Yahoo will get a board seat on Tyroo (via release).

Nikhil has many more details on ContentSutra.

While on the topic of online advertising in India, it would be great to know whats on the mind of the advertisers when it comes to the online medium.

There was an interesting piece on the advertiser’s perspective by Ratish Nair, CEO, Interactive Avenues. I’ve highlighted a few points below:

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