Rediff Rides High on Revenues, Visitors & Page Views! Soon to Launch ‘Regional Language Search’!
Rediff which is one of India’s largest and oldest portals has announced its 2nd quarter earnings and it seems like the future is bright for this portal. Rediff.com reported total revenues of US$7.9 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, an increase of 18% compared to the same quarter last fiscal year, with India Online revenues increasing by 22% to US$5.73 million and US Publishing revenues increasing by 9% to US$2.13 million.
Within the India Online business segment advertising revenues totaled US$4.26 million for the quarter ended September 30, 2007, an increase of 18% compared to the same quarter last fiscal year. Fee Based revenues totaled US$1.47 million, an increase of 35% compared to the same quarter last fiscal year.
Besides for the money in the bank Rediff has also announced that its unique visitors and page views has seen a sharp movement in the upward direction. It quoted the data compiled by Comscore Media Metrix which states that Rediff.com unique users grew by 9% during the quarter July-Aug-Sept over the previous quarter Apr-May-June while market growth was 6%. Over the same period Google, MSN and Yahoo grew unique users by 9%, 2% and 6% respectively.
Also with regards to page views Rediff.com’s page views grew by 49% during the quarter over the previous quarter while page view growth in the total Indian market was only 1%. Over the same period in the Indian market – Google and MSN page views declined by 3% and 12% respectively while Yahoo Sites grew by 4%.
Now the above numbers could be attributed to the web 2.0 initiatives like ishare, qna and ofcourse rediffs unlimited email announcement which was the first such announcement in the Indian space by an email provider and off late the addition of a web messenger. Going forward though i foresee that rediff would have to do much more than its currently doing both in terms of product and marketing inorder to sustain its current status against stiff international and growing indian competition and even grow at the rate at which its growing.
Admitting to the pressure from international competiion and better products Mr.Ajit Balakrishnan CEO Rediff.com said, ”We are entering an era of heightened competitive activity from our international competitors like Yahoo, Google, MSN and AOL and consequently we have enhanced our capital expenditure as well as expenditure on product development and bandwidth. This increased expenditure, we believe, will stand us in good stead by improving the competitiveness of our product offerings”
Hence Besides for riding high on revenues and page views Rediff has also taken the first steps into regionalising its search. It has announced that its working on beta testing a regional language search engine which will allow users to search in eight Indian languages using QWERTY keyboard and obtain results in their desired language. It remains to be seen how local language search or content takes off on the web as there have been views that it adds only an incremental benfit in terms of user addition and doesnt have a major impact on userbase.
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