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UTV To Invest 120 crores in 10 Internet Portals.. Completes ITNation Acquisition
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We had broken the story of UTV acquiring ITNation sometime back and now news is abuzz with the completion of the acquisition and the numbers are out. UTV paid 15 crores to acquire 76% of ITNation which owns digital news properties like Techtree.com , CXOToday.com, Channeltimes.com & Enterpriser.in. Earlier to ITNation UTV had acquired a controlling stake in indiagames.
Now it seems UTV like its contemporary Network18 is willing to bet its money on online portals and hence has announced that it would be investing 120 crores in total on 10 portals. Giving an indication on what to expect from UTV Mr.Prabhu said in this article that the portals wont be ecommerce centric. “We will not force the consumers to transact on our site,” said Mr Prabhu, CEO , UTV NewMedia. The key areas that they would focus on as pointed out by Mr.Prabhu is as follow:
- Digital music space
- Personal finance
- IT Nation’s portals
Network18 hived off a separate company web18 which has portals into cricket (cricketnext.com), finance (moneycontrol.com), jobs (jobstreet.com), ecommerce (storeguru.com), hindi portal (josh18.com), horizontal portal (In.com). Web18 has also raised 10 million in funding in 2006. I guess UTV will also follow suit and thats why the new business unit in UTV new media has been formed. Also given that UTV’s business news channel has just launched and the fact that they have launched utvi.com is proof that they have they weapons out for battle with Network18 as far as the digital space is concerned.
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Rajiv,
Can you write a blog comparing UTV and TV18? Things of interest could be their strengths and weaknesses in terms of the hits, # of registered users, revenues generated, brand recognition, demographies of their users etc.
Regards.