Vertical to Horizontal: Web18

While assessing some more shopping portals for promoting the festival gift voucher of my company, I landed on www.storeguru.com, the e-commerce team from web18 had contacted me earlier for placing our product there and I had thought I will take it up further during peak season. But the moment I opened the site today morning, I got the following message:

So, aggregation is in the season? www.storeguru.com has become http://shop.in.com! Infact yesterday only I had noticed another development of in.com. As a part of my job, I do give a quick glance to all entertainment industry headlines every morning and www.buzz18.com is one of the sites which come into my this list of regular visits. And since I’m a very regular visitor of this site so it didn’t take me much to notice that www.buzz18.com has now become http://buzz18.in.com/.

Well, quite a lot of development at in.com! We saw lots of online as well as television advertisement followed by some noticeable alliances with entertainment programs and now this movement of their vertical portals like Buzz18 and Storeguru to in.com. So, is web18 group moving from vertical portals to a horizontal one? I’m not sure of the exact objective of web18 for doing the same. Strategy of one horizontal portal or multiple vertical portals has different pros and cons, but I think the decision of consolidating one horizontal portal will definitely benefit in.com from traffic point of view. It will surely help in.com in selling higher traffic figures to advertisers and hence negotiate for better deals. Looks like a good movement but lets see if this aggregation helps in.com compete with the already existing horizontal players in India like Yahoo, Rediff etc.