So it appears that the Indian government extended its online advertising pilot by three months, effectively ending later this month (on January 20th 2013); the extension was granted in September last year. Old news, yes, but what is interesting is that what was a "pilot" project has now been extended well beyond over a year: we had written about last January, and even then the pilot was supposed to be for three months, and into its second month. This probably means that 36 websites have received government advertising, instead of the 20 sites which were to be selected and empaneled. The rates too would have remained the same: The 36 sites that benefit as a result of this empanelment: Group A (more than 5 million Unique Users per month): in.mail.yahoo.com, in.news.yahoo.com, yahoo.co.in, cricket.yahoo.com, cricinfo.com, timesofindia.com, rediff.com Group B (2 to 5 million Unique Users per month): naukri.com, in.movies.yahoo.com, timesjobs.com, moneycontrol.com, economictimes.com, ndtv.com, oneindia.com, monsterindia.com Group C (above 0.25 million for language websites, above 0.5 million for English websites, but below 2 million Unique Visitors per month): manoramaonline.com, ebay.in, ibnlive.com, dinamalar.com, galatta.com, raftaar.in, freshersworld.com, cricbuzz.com, maharashtratimes.com, indiatimes.com, navbharattimes.com, zapak.com, santabanta.com, money.rediff.com, bollywoodhungama.com, bhaskar.com, 99acres.com, jeevansathi.com Note that the Unique Visitors limit was set by the government over a year ago. Given the growth in Internet usage in the last year, at least as per the numbers reported by comscore, some of these sites could have gone beyond the 5 million uniques mark. Empanelment of SMS Services In addition, we chanced upon a pilot for SMS…
