Sify to my mind has pulled of a winner by tying up with wwe.com to be it’s Indian content partner. Though I haven’t found any news release regarding this yet, if one tries to access wwe.com from India, instead of the usual wwe home page we see an option to check out wwe.in or go directly to wwe.com. The wwe.in url redirects to wwe.sify.com which has both sify as well as wwe branding with what seems to be custom content tailored for the Indian audience.
Earlier when Rajiv blogged about wwe launching its own social network – fans.wwe.com, he had discussed the fact 10% of the traffic to wwe’s website came from India. That is a pretty big regional number, and considering it is an Alexa data chances are that the number could still be higher. Now it is hard to say if this tie up was initiated by sify or if it is a call taken by WWE to raise its online revenues by such local tie ups. I haven’t come across any piece of news that suggest that there are other such tie ups with local providers in other countries yet, if there are then we can safely presume it a strategic initiative by WWE to fight the recession which might have affected their revenues as well.
Sify has been trying to innovate its consumer business end since the beginning of the previous quarter. First it tried to gain a grip on its fast depleting email users by completely integrating Google mail and apps into its system. Then it announced its efforts to increase the user pie by bringing in courses which teach you how to browse the web and introducing single PC Internet Kiosks.
Branded pages seems to be the trend these days in online advertising. In.com certainly uses its extremely short URL to a good advantage to tie up with bollywood and television programs by giving them branded pages ala movie.in.com. It certainly moves with direction that pure banners which are essentially ripped off tv commercials don’t work on the web. The advantage of the web is interactivity and advertising is getting interactive online in this garb. For Sify this would be the best bet to target a generation of crowd that it has lost to Orkut and Facebook in India, and would surely improve its traffic numbers. The question though is can it hold on to these people long enough both in terms of accessing other site pages as well as coming back to wwe.in rather than wwe.com.
I can’t access the original wwe.com as the mentaly crippled souls at sify have decided whats best for me. They log me in to wwe.sify.com directly without asking me for the choice. This is very frustrating as the original wwe site is much better and I prefer it over the seriosly incompetent site the people at sify have tried to launch. Is there any way to get round the site? I’ve even tried blocking the it.
harsh, goto us.wwe.com, instead, that will solve ur problem, u might need to refresh 2 times for it to work properly.
your suggestion to take off this crappy sify.com site did not work well. Anybody with alternatives? I had enough of this! We all just need WWE.com and not anything else.