Content Network Instamedia, which owns around 15 niche content sites and the citizen journalism platform Instablogs, has raised $4 million from the Times of India group. The investment has been made via the groups Internet subsidiary Times Internet Limited (Indiatimes), and Satyan Gajwani, Director of Business Development, for the Times of India Group has joined InstaMedia's board of directors. Started four years ago, InstaMedia has previously raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Indiagames CEO Vishal Gondal in 2008, and received support from The Morpheus. We've requested both for information on whether they have exited the business. (Update: Both Gondal and The Morpheus remain invested, they've confirmed to us) InstaMedia includes content verticals like Luxury (BornRich.org), Green Living (Green Diary, EcoFriend), Gadgets (GizmoWatch, BornTechie, CellphoneBeat, Techfemina), Smart Homes (Hometone, Homeqn), Design (The Design Blog),Autos (AutoMotto), Fashion (StyleGuru), Entertainment (CelebGuru). All the properties, InstaMedia co-Founder and CEO Ankit Maheshwari told MediaNama, receive around 4 million unique visitors a month, and over 8 million pageviews. Plans The company intends to use the funding to revamp and ramp up its content model - it will move to a mostly freelance based model, with its in-house content team of around 40 managing the freelancers. This will help it ramp up its content output, which is currently at around 5000-6000 articles per month. The company had 400-500 freelancers working for it before the recession. Over 60% of its audience is from US and Europe. InstaMedia also plans to launch local language sites for the European…
Please subscribe to MediaNama. Don't share prints and PDFs.
You May Also Like
News
Google has released a Google Travel Trends Report which states that branded budget hotel search queries grew 179% year over year (YOY) in India, in...
Advert
135 job openings in over 60 companies are listed at our free Digital and Mobile Job Board: If you’re looking for a job, or...
News
By Aroon Deep and Aditya Chunduru You’re reading it here first: Twitter has complied with government requests to censor 52 tweets that mostly criticised...
News
Rajesh Kumar* doesn’t have many enemies in life. But, Uber, for which he drives a cab everyday, is starting to look like one, he...