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In.com

MySpace advances with Indian Entertainment Content

October 18, 2008

Joining the league of hosting official online communities for Indian movies / reality shows is now MySpace India. Social networking site MySpace will be hosting the official community of Star Plus dance reality Show, Nach Baliye – 4. MySpace is aggressively promoting this program so much so that most of the home page estate of Myspace has been allocated to Nach Baliye promos and content. The “Nach Baliye online community” is offering official content like photos, vidoes, inside stories, behind the scene scoop, wallpapers etc. Apart from these, viewers can vote for jodis (couples) as well as read the official blog giving all updates about the show. It’s also expected to have an online game based on Nach Baliye jodis but as of now I don’t see this feature up on the page.

 

 

Well, this trend of having an official community has picked up pretty fast in India. Now every other Bollywood release is having an official community on popular networking sites like Orkut or Facebook, to add to that there are these budding websites who have grabbed some interesting opportunities of being the official online community partner for entertainment properties. We saw some successful examples like Rock On community on Bigadda or Bigg Boss – season 2 community on In.com and not so successful examples like recent release Karzzzz community again on Bigadda. Social media is definitely a great medium to reach the larger mass in a very cost effective way and has been beneficial for some of the movies / entertainment programs. But if the site hosting such communities is a new one or one with lesser traffic then it’s more beneficial for that site as most of these programs are heavily promoted on television as well as online medium with repeated mention of the site thereby leading to more eyeballs and increased traffic. If news of increased traffic and pageviews of Bigadda has to be believed then this strategy of hosting official community has definitely worked for Bigadda, now let’s see if it works for other players like In or MySpace as well who are entering / have entered the same arena.

Vertical to Horizontal: Web18

October 17, 2008

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.