Sulekha.com started as a community website and is now being projected as a classifieds site. Speaking to MediaNama, Sulekha's President and CEO Satya Prabhakar spoke about the companys identity, direction and business performance. "Sulekha is India's version of Craigslist meets Yelp," Prabhakar said, adding that the site is sustained by social media. Craigslist is an online classifieds website while Yelp offers reviews, local search, events, e100tc. Sulekha is designed as a one stop shop for classifieds. Sulekha.com covers 50 cities today and has a user base of 6.2 million of which 80% are from India. In a presentation, he explains that the user base will boom when netbooks costing $100 (note that today there are only $200 netbooks available in India) will flood the country and the number of mobiles with Internet access grows. Isn't this what most Indian digital media firms are praying for? Tip Me With businesses making cutbacks, ad revenues dropping, we expected most websites offering free services would start charging users. We read that Sulekha had also started a paid model, but it turns out that this is more of a tipping service. Sulekha's users now will be prodded to pay Sulekha for the ad that helped them get a good deal or reach a much needed service. "They have an a priori choice to select one of our premium ads - which brings us Rs 300 - or they can post facto leave a tip after finding the information. It is entirely voluntary and we still…
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