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Guruji.com to follow Guru Google’s Adwords Model!
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Guruji.com which started a year back as one of the first few local indian search engine which took up the challenge of aggregating local information by making tie ups with infomedia has now gone ahead and announced its plans to launch a google adwords like model by 2008. Guruji which was funded by Sequoia Capital for 7 million $ has had a lot of competition since it launched from players like onyomo, asklaila and from its guru (google) itself which jumped onto the local search bandwagon earlier this year.
This latest announcement of an ad based monetization of its search listings has no surprises instored as its the way all search engines have been monetized since google cracked the adwords model of revenue generation. Also with the SEM industy in india going from strength to strength it was an no brainer move by guruji. As the local SEM segment is worth about $40-50 million in India. And the Indian market is expected to touch between $100-120 million in the next 3 years.
According to Dod, “The advantage that his company can bring to the table for advertisers is the ‘local’ aspect as also the cost advantage. We can open up the SME segment who have not used this method of advertising before.
What would be interesting to see is if they can bring any innovation in implementation of the adwords like model on guruji. I will also be interested in knowing how they plan to reach out to a fragmented SME market of India. Guruji’s pay per click cost would also play a major role in increasing adoption by small and medium advertisers.
They would have to license the use of technology from Yahoo.(Yahoo/Overture holds the patent)
Even google had to pay yahoo for the implementing the contextual ads.
Overture Services, Inc. sued Google for patent infringement in April 2002 in relation to the AdWords service. Following Yahoo!’s acquisition of Overture, the suit was settled in 2004 with Google agreeing to issue 2.7 million shares of common stock to Yahoo! in exchange for a perpetual license under the patent.
joot.in is another search engine for Indian cities. It uses google’s adsense for advertising. The search results are displayed in a clustered format similar to clusty.
Well this is a good start for the search engine market in India. But will they cope up and succeed with SE giants like Google, Yahoo, Msn ..we will have to wait and see
Regards
Josh
pic27.blogspot.com
patent wont be a problem as much as in india to begin with, others are already using similar techniques without having patent problem.
ofcourse they would be easily be able to find advertisers if they have the cost advantage but i seriously doubt if they would be able to service such huge amount of impression, they would surely have to signin a lot of local publishers for that, and they wont come easily if they get lesser cpc rates. so basically to strike a balance between the advertiser and publisher will be the main thing to consider