Guruji Sees Surge In Search Traffic – Will It Really Help Ad Revenue?
It was not so long ago when Guruji was termed as the next big thing on the Indian web scenario but what really happen is not less than a debacle.
Its USP of providing Indian based search results could never prove much useful to an average internet user.
This made them to introduce different services like music and directory search to improve their traffic despite it receiving flak from the blogging world.
Impact of music search engine?
The introduction of music services by Guruji really seemed to have helped them to inch forward with their traffic stats as this has catapulted them into top 5 search engines in India.
According to them they are currently receiving about one million searches a day.
There traffic shows an uptick after july – i.e. the launch of music search services.
Music services – the way forward?
Currently guruji provides music services by pulling feeds from other music sites like MusicMaza.com, MusicIndiaOnline, Dhingana and provides an interface to search them at one place.
There music services could attract a bunch of lawsuits in future because they also allow downloading of music content from wreck sites which in turn violates many laws. They are currently looking for associations with other legal music providers to launch their own inline music search service.
Can other services bring more traffic?
Their focus on providing Movie Timing search, local search (yellowpages) and music search is certainly bringing in traffic but could also be hurting their PPC revenues due to less dependency of advertisers on guruji’s search traffic and the objective moving to listening to music which lowers click through rates on ads.
Only time will tell if guruji’s strategy to diversify in different verticals helps both traffic and ad revenue in the long run. According to me the game with ad revenue will be tougher with multiple verticals.
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this is a classic example of startup evolution. And, if someone said that idea is just one thing and execution is most important one, they said it right because when executed, idea A could change to B in overall perspective. Thus, except for vision, every thing could change including team, idea, execution, marketing etc.
@ajitesh agreed but the evolution of guruji is taking them nowhere but to doldrums……..This sort of cheap tactics used by indian media companies is not worth its salt…..Many companies are even loosing heavy money by way of adword-adsense arbitrage cos how intelligence does it seems to acquire customer through adwords and make money.Thats what they been doing they even have to acquire users through adwords for their music service…..wasting there funding capital ….guruji has got no solid money making business model till date…
Startup evolution does not ofcourse means you make it easier to look for illegal content. Most of the songs(if not all) are being served from illegal mp3 sites in Pakistan.
A traffic surge is quite pointless. Its like making a giant search engine for warez, it will sure get hits and users, but does it make good long term business sense?
Its even more surprising the music companies haven’t gone after them with jest till now.
If there is still growth in search engine traffic, then this should serve as good news to those who are targeting these searches using the right combination of keywords. Now if there is a tool that can be used to identify popular keywords, then much better.
Guruji needs to do several things to move forward.
1.Recognition : If the customer does not know you, they cant use your service. Drive awareness of brand through several consumer touch points.
2. Differentiation : There is nothing different from a consumers point of view from that Guruji offers, after all they are not just competing with Google but also with local service providers like just dial or ask laila.
3. Innovation : Whats new here? the consumer should be able to get several answers to this question. Else they will just move on.
Also I think it’s time we realized that advertising revenue based models on the net in India are still in the nascent phase. Till we cross that hurdle collectively, individual enterprises are going to keep struggling to move forward.
Today when a user have to search for a file they use rapidlibrary or filesbot,when search about a job careerjet or bixee etc. etc…This tells us a point there is a lot of space for many search engines only if they simplify a problem not addressed by google or other biggies…lets take an example : It takes 2 clicks and 2 pop up to just see stock price in moneycontrol and the web site is very clogged…this opportunity was sensed by bixee and they launched http://finance.bixee.com/ …..which makes search simpler…..Guruji should take lessons and is already doing it(guruji finance) from bixee as they have opened a good line of search engines….like education, health.
Guruji’s search engine and ad platform just sucks!!
Their only business which I see a Potent is their ad platform(A billion dollar model) but they have to improve cos what’s the use of million dollar funding when the ad platform looks like a 100$ script……cos the data gets updated a whole day later such ad networks I can create by just sitting at home…
They can even focus on education search by searching education forums and showing meaningful results…cos that’s what guruji(teacher) should do
I think 80 – 90% of Guruji ads can be seen on Adult Masala boards, porno sites and MFA types of blogs. So the quality of traffic really sucks.