Serial entrepreneur and ad guru Ashok Kurien, along with Arvindra Singh Kanwal, CEO, india.com, talk to Disha Thakker about the portal’s journey so far and the road ahead that points at e-commerce and social media marketing
Many in the industry call him King Midas. Most media properties he touched have literally turned into gold - Zee TV, Hanmer & Partners, Playwin/Lotteries (PIPL), DishTV, Flora2000.com… Investing in futuristic businesses has become his second calling, the first being sports, in particular boxing. But let us not go on about ‘serial entrepreneur’ Ashok Kurien’s past; let’s look at his latest undertaking, india.com.
The website modestly describes itself as a joint venture between digital media dynamo Penske Media Corp and Zee Entertainment Enterprises. Don’t be swayed by the reticence when you read the ‘About Us’ tab on india.com - the website has reached 21 million unique users in July and September, according to Google Analytics, and is today one of the fastest growing internet companies in India, that too without having spent crores in advertising and sales. Their secret has been the internet space’s key element in generating web traffic -- search engine optimization or SEO.
“It’s got to be great content and SEO that will bring in organic traffic. More than 70% traffic on india.com is organic, which means people are coming back and new guys are coming in on the strength of the content and site itself. It is very easy to demonstrate something by spending huge marketing money… you notice that we have got no ad campaign,” Kurien says, while emphasizing that india.com is not a valuation game for him, but about building a property that will actually make profit on every one of the verticals it has.
Umbrella brand
Arvindra Singh Kanwal, CEO, india.com, explains these verticals by dubbing india.com as a house of brands and rightly so, as it has several independent sites rolled up under its domain. At the time of its launch, it was a perception among non-industry users that the site was just an umbrella organization that outsourced its content to several other sites and in return, gave them their clicks. However, a more detailed survey directed them back to Zee Group, india.com’s holding company. All its verticals, News (zeenews. com), Business (zeebiz.com), Auto (oncars.in), Education indiancolleges.com and careerfundas.com), Entertainment (bollywoodlife.com and video.india.com), Cricket (cricketcountry.com), Technology (bgr.in), Health (health.india.com) and Travel (travel.india.com) are run by india.com or Zee Group via its editorial teams.
So what is the logic behind so many separate websites, rather than just having sectional tabs such as general news, entertainment, cars, lifestyle, etc., on the home-page? “Think of us as an inverted portal and not a flat portal. Our core competence is creating content. When we decided to create content, we decided to create destination sites,” explains Kanwal. They also didn’t want to ‘mix up identities’. “A site like Auto, which is essentially a transaction vertical, cannot follow a media approach like zeenews.com or even bollywoodlife.com that predominantly has a pictorial and essay format. So we fashioned india. com to create an umbrella brand which marries all the properties we create,” explains Kurien.
“Our strengths are to build these content sites, their data base, their attitude, etc.,” says Kanwal. “We have a solid editorial team in place for each vertical.”
Engaging fans in cricket & entertainment
india.com had a full launch about 14 months ago, with the World Cup as the centre-point. Rather than reporting just news and scores, they decided to hit upon fan engagement. Experts from various parts of the world and newspaper groups like Indian Express, etc., were brought in to write ‘engaging’ content and in their first month, india.com’s cricketcountry.com hit the four million users mark.
“Cricketcountry is the destination site for fans and as the community products roll out, all our fan features are getting enhanced. Right now, we have expert fans writing for us. They are not paid but they get to create their own following and they create a lot of viral traffic for the site,” says Kanwal.
The graph by Comscore for the month of August shows they are at par with Cricbuzz, a website that was launched eight years ago. Kurien claims that the cricketcountry.com traffic is completely organic and no marketing spend is involved in it.
Another of india.com’s verticals is its priority site, bollywoodlife.com. “Its content is very featurish. We take the same film gossip, but add some style and opinion to it, and make it more pictorial ad-essayish. Here too, we try to have interactive formats,” says Kanwal.
Based on a lazy loading format, bollywoodlife.com facilitates easy surfing, with a long scroll feature so that users don’t have to flip pages for the pictures to load. “It is getting underrated in terms of time spend because people are actually going up and down the page and it doesn’t get counted, but the whole lazy loading format is working for us,” explains Kanwal. The content for both the general and business news sites is taken care of by the Zee News team.
So what are the challenges before india.com? “Travel and shopping,” says Kanwal. For travel, they have the content in place and have partnered with goibibo.com for transactions. For shopping, they are looking at bringing on board anyone who has the correct back-end infrastructure in place for an online shopper experience.
India.com’s latest acquisition, brownpaperbag.com, is a quirky lifestyle site that has got many high-society eyeballs glued to it because of its stylish reportage. india.com has acquired 26% stake in it and now it is a widget under the lifestyle section on their homepage. The link takes you to their original website, and this type of integration with a bigger portal is not very common. Other portals, claims Kurien, would have merged their identity with BPB. Until now, this is the only outside integration that they have done.
The road ahead
The imminent destination for almost all major portals today is the burgeoning e-commerce space. So what is india.com doing in that direction? “We are into e-commerce services and are creating transactions for offline services online. On the product front, we have rock. in, but two more people are going to come on board to sell their products on our website,” says Kanwal.
In 30 days, their car vertical has managed to sell about 30 cars, they claim, and apparently, it was “just a test run”. “Now we are getting into end-to-end car sale and delivery and out target is to hit 300 cars a month,” says a very excited Kurien, explaining that they have set up a call centre to facilitate the connect with dealers.
Since August, india.com has also been producing a couple of hours of video content daily across six channels on YouTube for five verticals. In an exclusive partnership with the web-video giant, they are also broadcasting six hours of Hindi and language entertainment content per day on a specific channel.
Soon, india.com is also launching a premium ad network. “Network Play is the only big premium ad network in the country,” says Kanwal, adding that their network will be fronted by their verticals.
Kurien has an interesting parting shot – india.com’s imminent entry in the social marketing space: “We are not trying to take on Facebook, but we will be in that space in a slightly different way,” he says.
Feedback: disha.thakker@exchange4media.com
