Web18 to Launch Horizontal Portal this Month?
Web18 Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd, the Internet arm of Network18 Media and Investments Ltd is set to launch a horizontal portal, said two people familiar with the development (according to Livemint).
A horizontal portal refers to an Internet portal site that offers a broad range of content and services. Exampels could be Rediff, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL etc.
Web18 had launched Josh18 sometime back – that portal comes close to being a horizontal player but it lacks things like travel booking and email; 2 essentials I would say when it comes to classifying a portal as horizontal.
Web18 has 15 stand alone sites in various field of interest such as cricket, finance, shopping, travel, news, jobs, technology etc. and thus it makes perfect sense to integrate all these sites into one complete portal. Incidentally, Web 18’s top portal MoneyControl has seen traffic falling drastically over the last few days. The result is a confluence of their 3 top portals – CricketNext, IBNLive, and MoneyControl. By the way – is Alexa biased against regional sites or does Josh18 really linger below English content sites? Anyone with information on that?
Incidentally when a group is launching an array of services, I think its better if they have one mother brand which can then be used to nurture all the other brands. It becomes a logistical and marketing nightmare to harness 16 different brands with different identities. There are no spill over effect, no positive externalities, all of them need separate budgets etc. We saw in automotive how GM succumbed to Toyota because of issues related to managing multiple brands – all of which were not successful. In the Internet Space too, Google offers tons of products and applications and the ‘G’ before the brand adds that force. They follow a more or less generic branding strategy. Web18 would have benefited if it did more of that. It would be interesting to see what the portal is called.
T.R. Madan Mohan, a managing partner at Browne and Mohan had another interesting point to make – “Rediff is valued at $200 million (Rs846 crore), while a vertical like Naukri (job portal) is valued at four times that. Sify has one-tenth the value of travel portal Makemytrip.”
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its caled www.in.com
company has supposedly paid 2 crores for the domain name
yes, its in.com, already beta is up..i signed up to grab the initial wanted username…seems very cool one, not at all congested like rediff, bigadda or even yahoo…
Thanks for the tip off guys! Keep it coming!
n its finally launched a private beta… anyone can go and register at in.com.. :)the best part of it is… lot more is coming soon…
Prashnt(design head)
in.com
Hey Prashant! we already wrote about the launch - great layout by the way. Very cool and innovative!
Wat is Horizontal portal anyway, defining it in words of LiveMint.com doesn’t convince me, every site would say it has wide variities of topics than does every site fall in same Horizontal Portal, even the blogs have categories.. than blogs with more than 100 categories will be Horizontal blog (huh!) ….also wat is vertical search, is it an analogy to it…..
…Rajiv its a question to you specifically…waiting for your reply ..you can take help from internet that you do perfectly as a resource for your every blog post !! right!
Saanchi - if you read the post, Josh 18 comes close to being a Horizontal Portal because it offers a broad range of content; it doesn’t quite make the cut because its range of service offerings is limited. For exampel, no email, no travel bookings, no matrimonial services, no shopping, no answers forum etc. So a horizontal portal would broadly have a wide range of content AND services. With respect to blogs - if a portal has 100 categories then i think it would be safe to say that its a horizontal blog portal (in my opinion atleast) - so for example instablogs could be termed as a horizontal blog portal. Remember again that blogs rarely provide services. So the classifications are different. With respect to horizontal search, a Google would be a horizontal search player while a local search engine - say an Asklaila or a Guruji would be a vertical search player. Certain search players such as Yulop have extremely focussed city specific search verticals.
PS Everyone uses the Internet - the boon of the internet is information dissemination!
I think i couldn’t have replied better than harshil.. Thanks for helping me out mate!