Rediff India Q1 Revenues Up 42% - “We are looking At Acquiring Companies” - Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman Rediff.com
(Rate this article)
Loading ...Email It!
Rediff announced its first quarter results and things are looking bright as far as the Indian online business is concerned. Here are the highlights of the key numbers:
India Online revenues up to 6.56 Million $ from 4.62 Million $ same quarter last year. That works out to an increase of 42% in the India revenues
The US publishing revenues have seen a fall of 19% from 2.18 last year same quarter to 1.76 this quarter.
Key highlights of this quarter include:
Rediff Vertical Search: Rediff added search tools for tickets and schedules for approximately 20,000 buses that commute daily between approximately 10,000 locations in India. Rediff also added train search, High school exam results for 70 different exam boards and extending the video search coverage to over 2 million videos.
Firefox Toolbar: With firefox gaining market share rediff was quick to launch a firefox compatible toolbar for the for Firefox 3 within a week of the launch of this version of the browser.
Investment in Vakow: The Vakow investment and the launch of the rediff mail on mobile were the other highlights
Social Feeds on rediffmail: The availability of the orkut and facebook feeds on rediffmail
Rediff Platforms: Launch of the rediff API developer platform which aims at leveraging the developer community and rewarding the same. Watch the exclusive WATShow with Head Rediff Platforms Mr.Zaki Ansari
I was logged into the conference call and here are some of the key statements that were made by Mr.Ajit Balakrishnan Chairman of Rediff.com
- As per Comscore Rediff users have seen a 13% growth in June 08 vs Mar 08
- Rediff growth higher than industry average of 6% and more than what is seen by Google and Yahoo
- Our strategy is to take leadership position in vertical search (train, bus, exam, video etc)
- Rediff Moneywiz users growing rapidly and will be monetized soon.
- Number of advertisers have grown to 260 companies vs 250 last quarter vs 172 last year same quarter
- Advertisers contributed 75% of total India Online revenue
CPM advertising will grow more than Performance based advertising - As mainstream advertisers will start putting in more money online. October - December quarter could be one where more money is pumped. - We are starting to see interesting acquisition options. Startups around IIT Mumbai and Institute of sciences bangalore have caught our interest.
WATBlog Analysis: Rediff had invested in TachyonTech and invested in Vakow which is an sms based startup. Rediff seems to be opening up more and more to the idea of acquiring technology centric startups. Infact Mr.Ajit Balakrishnan himself underlined that funds would be invested in product innovation inorder to compete with the likes of Google and Yahoo. So I think all of us can expect more acquisition announcement from the rediff stablein the near future. Also with the opening up of their developer platform they seem to even want to get rediff’s core features be contributed by developer community and focus on what they do best sell ad inventory.
Loading ...
Leave a Reply