"Online advertising in India definitely has resumed growth," according to Rediff.com Chairman and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan, who says the pricing power for the company, on an average, grew 26% as compared to the same quarter last year. However, for the quarter ended June 30, 2010, the company's India online revenues grew by a disappointing 5.82%, despite a 16% increase in core India online advertising revenues, compared to Q1 last fiscal. Remember that it was in the second quarter of last fiscal that Rediff switched to a minimalist format. Rediff's overall revenues grew only 4.44% to $5.18 million for the quarter, and its US publishing revenues declined 1%. At the end of the quarter, Rediff's cash balance - its lifeline - shrunk to $41 million, from $44.7 million at the end of the previous quarter. The company plans to continue investing $1-1.5 million per quarter in the next 2 -3 quarters to push for user growth: compared to the same quarter last year, Rediff says its total registered users for Rediff grew 15%, to 92 million. How many of them are active? On the services side of the business, Rediff, which runs the shopping site Rediff Shopping, expanded logistics support to service 40,000 pin codes in India, extended cash-on-delivery facility to 4,500 new pin-codes in this quarter, saying that a higher proportion of orders placed are delivered within 24 hours. As we'd reported a few days ago, Rediff launched a Casual Games service called PlayGully, integrated into its social networking feature MyPage.…
