The India Today Group Online (Digital Today) has launched two properties over the past couple of months – ITGO and Woman. As per our sources, they’re planning to launch a revamped version of Aaj Tak (website for their Hindi TV Channel) next month. At present, AajTak is behind a subscription wall, with access to video content priced at $11.99 per year.
India Today’s Woman is competition for Web18s Indiwoe Indiwo. The site features blogs, as well as sections on Health, Beauty, Careers, Money, Relationships, with expert advice on offer. Some tools, allowing users to calculate their Body Mass Index. At the MediaNama launch discussion last month, Mrutyunjay Mishra (Co-Founder, Juxtconsult) had asked about the total base of Indian women on the net – around 18-20 percent? I guess there needs to be more woman focused content like this to get advertisers interested (not that women read only sites like Indiwo and Woman, of course). Woman is probably a target for Goosefish’s vertical ad network – Diva Nation
ITGO appears to be the general interest portal that CEO Ashish Bagga had mentioned in an interview over a year ago. It features content related to news, lifestyle, health, sports, finances, travel, and also featured columns and Blogs…It appears to be an aggregator of content from across India Today group publications (compare this and this, or this and this)…and I wonder why they bothered with individual sites for their publications in the first place.
Blogging for ITGO are talk show host Koel Purie and Dipen Sheth, Head of Research, Wealth Management Advisory Services. They also appear to be aggregating blogs from other India Today properties, with posts from editors and journalists. The section I found most interesting is a showcase of reader comments on ITGO stories, called “I Say“. One issue there – I don’t think they should display user email addresses with the comments.
So who has taken over from Sanjoy Narayan as the Head of Digital Today?
Disclosure: I own an inconsequential number of shares of Network18. Web18, which runs Indiwo, is a part of the Network18 group
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3 Comments until now.
At some level, I want all these ‘women only’ properties to fail! The presumption that somehow the only way to reach women is by discussing food, diet, beauty and men is just so pathetic and stereotypical.
May be it is the company I keep but somehow, apart from the context of my research, these topics never come up. Interestingly international trade, regulation, politics (inc gender and alt-sexuality politics) come up very often. WHich is why women don’t read just these sites.
I wonder if the content focus is advertiser driven for these women portals and magazines. To some extent, magazines focused on men suffer from a similar form of myopia – sports, women and cars (not that we’re not interested in them).
I remember this mag called Gentleman from the Indian Express Group…thought provoking content. It shut down 6-7 years ago, and my copies were lost in a fire.
“my copies were lost in a fire”
Gentlemen on Fire ??
JFYI you can find some of old copies in Scrap book shop of Nai Sarak ,Nehru Place or chor bazaar at Red Fort .