We had blogged about 6 months back on Glam media’s plans to start Ad operations in India. 6 months later Glam has announced the acquisition of Adaptive Ads an advertising startup with offices in Mumbai and San Francisco. Through the acquisition, Glam Media is opening an office in Mumbai and establishing an engineering presence in Pune, India.
Techcrunch reports that Adaptive ads was looking at a series B funding with with a valuation in the $25 million to $40 million. There is no word though on how much was the value of this acquisition. The team leading adaptive ads is of Indian origin much like the CEO and Founder of Glam Media Samir Arora.
Now with actual presence in India I wont be surprised if Glam looks to cater to the Indian market as well. After all as per alexa India as a country is the 3rd largest source of traffic for glam.com contributing over 8% of glams traffic. There are a few players targetting women as a segment in India and one of the recent entrants in the space is Indiatimes with iDiva which was launched recently. There is also indiwo by Web18 group but none of them are that large or as glamourous as Glam.com.
It remains to be seen what route Glam takes in India both in terms of building further traction and attracting advertisers (if at all).
umm.. there’s no online ad money in India. You can have 50 million Indian visitors but the Indian ad agencies are not convinced about the suitability of internet as an advertising media. The online ad spend in India is barely $200 million. I don’t see any real benefit of having India as an online market. Of course, India is a great place to have your backend operations in.