Web18 started consolidating it’s portals sometime back and except moneycontrol, most of it’s portals have been moved under the domain, in.com.
Let’s try to understand the rationale behind this consolidation:
The Traffic
In.com, thanks to all the aggressive marketing campaigns (plus some other means) seems to beat Web18′s most-trafficked site and the cashcow, moneycontrol.
Apart from the total number of visits,In.com seems to attract more user engagement than any other portal:
The challenges of ‘Too many’
How many brands/products can web18 create? What about the cost involved in marketing all of these properties?
After a while, what’s really important is user-centric features and not a long list of products (Google realized it long time back and Larry said ‘Features, not Products‘)
And consolidating all of them under a brand umbrella is where it makes sense – and only in.com can potentially be that umbrella (rest of the portals have a strong vertical focus) – you will notice that except moneycontrol, all other portals are now being redirected as sub-domain of in.com (301 redirection, so that they don’t lose any search engine juice).
Monetization?
The bigger challenge, in my opinion is monetization – majority of web18 properties’ (to be specific in.com, tech2, moneycontrol etc) ad inventory is still being monetized via Google adsense – something which just doesn’t make sense, owing to the rev share arrangements between Google and the portals (and that shows up in their revenues as well).
Essentially, they were leaving money on the table – and that’s why the investment (via capital18, Network18′s venture arm) in the newly launched ad network, Networkplay – so, do expect a synergy (and deep partnership) there.
Moreover, you need to consolidate salesforce in the times when advertisers are trimming their budgets – otherwise its damn difficult to sell sites having lesser traffic (like josh18/storeguru etc).
Now that In.com has redirected most of the portals, we do expect some sort of personalization in the portal – a sort of my.yahoo/iGoogle feature that can give a glimpse of content across all the sites?
What’s your take on in.com’s strategy?
Recommended Read: The Secret Behind In.com’s Traffic
Also, Network18 has shelved its IPO plans and is planning to raise Rs 2 billion upwards through private placement.
Monitization is not through Google Adsense alone. They also have the MOST IRRITATING roll over advertising from kontera.
Yeah..and those are the most useless ways to monetize any property.
“shelved it’s IPO plans” should be “its”, not “it’s”. Sorry, gets to me everytime
My take is that consolidation was the only route available to them. A fractured and vertical-happy portfolio such as theirs would have put too much strain on the bottom-line: sites that don’t do too well but needed to be run as brands, plus content-creation cost, plus legal issues, plus backend overhead, and so on… always messy. Only consolidation made sense. It wasn’t so much a strategy as it was the only way forward.
The smartest move they made, one that could be viewed as a ‘strategy’ was buying that domain.
Thanks for correcting
Will update.
Yep – the smartest move was to buy something which can be easily marketed as well as create a ‘cool’ factor around it! (world’s smallest email id!)
The question is how far the cool factor can attract traffic to the portal. The email market is pretty much stable and the existing players are too big for Web18. Consolidation of the services will enable them to operate from a single platform and considering the indian market, they have made a brave step.
Suvin K Varkey
http://www.logicmanse.com
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Cheap misleading shit by in.com – So one must congratulate In.com for the cheapest tactic to garner traffic.
Just type Yahoo.in.com or Rediff.in.com or any leading website in India. You will find that it redirects to in.com – which I am sure is not the intention for millions who may misspell or try to reach Indian sites thinking in.com means an extension to the URL for the Indian site of these sites.
Shame on you Viacom!
and it already shows with your declining pageviews and reach on Alexa.