The Indian Express Group has launched Techook.com, a website which joins an already overflowing space of gadget review and how-to sites. What's interesting here is that the company says that Techook will remain "ad free". Then how will they monetize? In response to a query from MediaNama, Sandeep Amar, CEO of Indian Express Digital said that monetization is not a priority for Techook, but "we will monetize via native advertising and some video advertising(native and display) as well." How Techook is approaching content From a content perspective, it's interesting to see a mix of reviews, news and How-to guides: all three are very powerful in terms of attracting traffic to a site, and will be important for Techook to demonstrate unique readership to attract advertisers for native advertising. From a reviews perspective, the company says it is differentiating itself by offering an independent numeric rating for each smartphone, and subjecting phones to "a rigorous review process which includes testing over a seven day period, to generate a comprehensive performance report. Note that the numeric average rating feature is strikingly similar to existing gadget review sites like PhoneRadar, NDTV Gadgets and CNET, which also provide percentile rating out of 100 or numeric rating out of 10 with specific sub-category rating for a gadget’s properties like Designs, build-quality, camera, hardware performance, camera quality among others. It also borrows a feature from sites like GSM Arena, Phone Arena, and Engadget, which provide an encyclopedia for gadgets and smartphones. The review feature which aggregates a hardware component’s score,…
