Rediff.com India’s leading online portal has replaced launched an advertising service for small and local advertisers called localads. If one would recollect rediff had launched Pay4Clicks advertising model way back in 2006. But for some reason the same could not scale. Though Pay4clicks was an attempt at creating an Indian version of adwords of sorts it somehow just managed to be a pay per click classified. Rediff had offered free listings at the time of Pay4clicks launch. I remember using pay4clicks and was pretty happy with the result of the free version. Its a pity that they could never scale the technology behind P4C to add features that would help it to scale both from an advertiser and a publisher perspective.
The current offering of local ads is more in the classifieds than in the adwords mold. Local ads is designed for small and home businesses such as travel agents, tuition classes, insurance agents, matrimony services, estate agents, pre-owned car sellers, maintenance contractors and others. Currently local ads is free to use and anyone can post any ads that they feel like. Given this model Rediff local ads is a direct competitor to the likes of quikr.com (ebay & Matrix partners backed local classifieds.).
Why couldn’t rediff create an adwords?
One wonders why couldn’t create an adwords like model given its scale and reach to advertisers. I mean as far as the Indian online advertising is concerned Rediff is one of the giants that has built its business on this model. So a longtail model of online advertising given that Rediff has every concievable vertical right from entertainment to cricket and access to large and small advertisers would have made so much sense.
Well one could have the following two answers to that question..
1) They never had a product/technology centric model as a company – Lets face it.. Rediff is a media company and not one that creates beta releases and feature updates and product roadmaps through out the life cycle of the product. Even if they do have all this they still focus on content and ad sales as their forte unlike Google which creates products (and has a blog for each product) that users use and they wrap around ads on it which again is driven by a product adwords and not a classifieds engine which is more media like.
2) They never wanted to create an adwords - One of the thoughts could be the fact that Rediff never wanted to create an adwords model. Adwords is one of the more cost effective and efficient ways of advertising which means advertisers spend less and get more. Rediff which primarily sells its inventory on CPM would kill its own revenues to some extent if it went the adwords model. Yes there was Pay4Clicks but the customization and value was so limited (it was using vacant inventory spots on rediff) that it would attract only small advertisers where as the big advertisers would continue to spend on rediff at the CPM or any other deal negotiated. So in effect it makes sense for rediff to not create a sophisticated ad management and reporting tool which lowers overall spend per inventory but may increase volumes.
Well I think you are spot on with your analysis of rediff. I visit this site each and every day for news(which I think is not that badly written and quiet fast reporting). Only place they lack is product centric approach. From what I hear they have a rather good tech. team. Only if rediff had vision of creating good products and knew that creating value for consumers pay.