Times Of India group's digital venture Times Internet has inked a strategic partnership with luxury blog Pursuitist to launch and manage its Indian edition at pursuitist.in. The site is live, although it currently has a placeholder page with content from Pursuitist.com. This deal is part of Times Internet's Times Local Partners (TLP) initiative, through which it partners with global digital companies to build and launch their Indian editions. Previous partnerships includes Gawker Media for the Indian editions of Gizmodo and Lifehacker which went live in May 2013, Business Insider for Business Insider India which went live in September 2013 and Ziff Davis for Indian editions of its gaming site IGN and men’s lifestyle site AskMen which is yet to go live. Similar to these deals, Times Internet will have exclusive rights to Pursuitist brand and its content in India and the company intends to use The Times Group’s multimedia resources to help develop this brand locally. Times Internet will also be combining Pursuitist editorial with India-specific content in this edition. The deal period or the terms of the partnership were not disclosed. What's worth noting here is that Times Internet is licensing brands which competes with its own brands - Pursuitist competes with its own luxury blog Luxpresso while Ask Men (licensed through the Ziff Davis partnership) will compete with Times Internet's MensXP. Gizmodo India also competed with Technoholik, but the latter was merged with Times Of India's tech section after Gizmodo India's launch. On the flipside, having two prominent brands in specific segments might provide Times Internet significant leverage with advertisers looking for a specific audience segment and at AskMen partnership launch, Times Internet CEO Satyan Gajwani had claimed that these…
