Is Web18’s Horizontal Portal In.com A Smart Strategy?
At a time when niche sites are shining brighter, comes Web18 with its horizontal portal In.com. Given that for the quarter ending March 31, 2008, Web18 made a net loss of Rs. 14.3 crore, inspite of registering a year-on-year revenue growth of 112%, is this the right move? Moreover, take a look at these facts:
- Rediff is valued at $200 million (Rs 846 crore), while a vertical like Naukri is valued at four times that.
- Sify has one-tenth the value of travel portal Makemytrip.
- Yahoo is struggling, while Google is thriving at five times the value.
- eCPMs of large websites have dropped 52% from 38 cents in March to 18 cents in April in the US.
The site itself provides a wide variety of services and features, including email, matrimonial, games, music, shopping, video, travel, news, etc. For most of these, it serves more of an aggregator, and in doing so, also serves as a good platform for a lot of the other services under the Web18 stable (think Yatra, StoreGuru, etc.). Over time, I suspect we can expect to see a lot of the other websites in the network coming under this umbrella. The interface itself is very clean and uncluttered.
In the end however, the question remains whether a horizontal portal is a smart strategy given the increasing emphasis towards niche, unless the purpose is to use it as a platform to present all the other services under the Web18 umbrella.
Filed under: Ideas & Innovations