Media sites roping celebrities to blog – Does that work?

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ibibo has roped in Ravi Shastri for their cricket blog, and MTV VJ sophie to blog for ibibo’s dance reality show, iSuperstar. Another Indian Startup is bringing a celebrity movie director to blog@ their network site (to be announced later).

I am ofcourse intrigued by all this and am wondering whether bringing in celebrity bloggers really work?

In my opinion, what works is quick glimpse of a celebrity - for e.g. Rediff’s ‘Chat with <celebrity X>’, ‘Y! India’s ‘Qns from President Kalam’ etc – these interactive activities are more fun than receiving daily doze of ‘paid content‘.

Have a quick look at Ravi Shashtri’s blog@ ibibo and answer these qns:

• Is he sharing some insights?
• Is he live blogging? Of course, not (not even expected).

Shastri’s blog is actually more of a match-summary post and nothing beyond that (do you agree?)

Lets go back to basics and understand what is the purpose of a celebrity blog?
Well, if you ask ibibo – 6 ibibo users/finalists wil get to meet Ravi Shastri and 18 superstar contestants will be chosen for the reality show- which means atleast 1000X users will hopefully add lot more content/eyeballs/pageviews to the site and simplistically put, more adverti$ing $$s.

But what happens beyond that?
Do celebrity bloggers add stickiness to the site? Or are these activities a sort of 1-night stand? (or 1-click stand)?

What do you guys think?

Asides, it’s interesting to see how ibibo is experimenting (like balti ads) with cross-media plays; and in a way, creating a market which hopefully will benefit other players too.

tags: ibibo, img credit