reminds one of what Web18 was doing a couple of years earlier.. Remember Nikhil, you had written about their "launching frenzy":)

yep. This is a frenzy as well, but my sense is that there's a difference here, in terms of sales reach and segmentation:

They're creating segments where they already have advertisers, so it might be about taking the same sales team and upselling online. If Indiatimes starts doing the sales for segments where the group already has relationships, then it doesn't make sense. Web18, afaik, didn't do that, and launched multiple unrelated portals. MoneyControl & IBNLive are successful because you have TV supporting them, and lets face it, they needed that crutch to get started.

With Indiatimes, it really depends on how they build out the content for each property, and the kind of sales deals they do (preferably, sponsorship, long term). I'm bearish on Indiatimes' luxury sites, because I think that's more of a magazine market, and even if they get the advertisers, they may not get the quality readers. ambivalent on Technoholik, because that's a crowded market and they'll need more Notion Ink type stories to break through the clutter. In case of DigitalBE, mature businesses like E4m do around 11 crore or thereabouts in topline.

They'll have to watch out for the cost of content and cashflows, though. That's going to determine whether these businesses are successful or not. I know that all too well.

I'm not so sure about whether it's good to have an experienced editorial team. I'd rather have someone who's got an instinct for the blog game doing this – which is why Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan is a good bet, if he's focusing primarily on content…him managing biz and content would stretch him out too far, and I know how crippling that can be.

Deep pockets or not, if Indiatimes is just going to throw money at this gig, then it's going to become complacent and sink. You need people with prominent bylines and ownership of the content they're doing. It's about passion and long term commitment. Without that, it'll just be a print property online.

Quite agree with you on the clutter part Nikhil. What pains is the lack of right heads on both sides – the blogs and the advertisers/prs. If there is anyway a brand like TC or Engadget has to come from India it would take the ecosystem to either mature or some real unreasonable effort. If an AOL could create a TC or web blogs they wouldn’t have sunk those millions. Will such a scenario happen In India, my guess – Yes.

Disclaimer: very much a player in the same market.

indiatimes.com = timesofindia.com + economictimes.com
8.4 mln users = 5.9 mln users + 1.5mln users
throw in some sem as well. so as you can see, this really is a timesofindia game and the rest dont matter.
Comscore sept 2010.

One thing that people seem to forget is the audience and their association of certain publisher brands with certain kinds of content.

TOI group is all about mass content, with some "local" flavour (Bombay Times, Mumbai Mirror etc). It has dabbled in its "interpretation" of luxury but has never built a brand there.

Please remember that both the audience and luxury brands are picky about where they will spend their time and money. This seems to be a reach play (more inventory) with some vertical thrust. This will allow their digital sales team to sell a broader portfolio with some seemingly high-end verticals.

Given their DNA, I do not expect print teams to sell anything here.

Googly is at it again. Guess he is from rediff :-)

@ Nikhil, yes, I too am not much optimistic about Indiantimes’ niche blogs because at the end of the day, they have to recover their investment and these kinds of properties are not going to bring in number of readers and thus no advertisers or money.

Secondly, even though Indiatimes, Rediff and Web18 are like Tatas, Ambanis and Birlas of Indian portal space, they are blinded by their need for short term page views and are, unfortunately, taking the easy route of serving soft-porn to bring in numbers. Rediff had brilliant content till it went into smartphone- homepage mode and started losing page views/ readership. To compensate for that, it has now started promoting “mypage” videos with pornographic titles on homepage, just like web18 & Indiatimes do with aggregated photo galleries / content.

Where this will get these sites with advertisers and readers in, say, 5 years down the line? They are serving content based on what they “assume” the readers want. Someone someday is going to come up with what the readers actually “need” and take away the numbers. It happened with Netscape, it happened with Orkut, it happened with AOL. No guarantee that it will not happen with these three current giants of Indian portal space.