Forum Moderators: open
Rediff.com has a registered user base of 35 million. To put that in context, India has 20 million Internet users and 50 million mobile phone users. All studies we have done indicate that we've reached in excess of 70 percent of the Indian market. Yahoo is a close number two, and MSN is a poor number three.
I am based in india and have seen rise and fall of portals in last 8 years. rediff isnt no.1 at all. and they havent bothered to mention indiatimes witch is far bigger, yet not the largest.
the largest and most pospular is still yahoo india in terms of popularity and indiatimes in terms of gaining footage.
I am in Mumbai India, Indiatimes is a failure. Here is why ... Imagine that you have a FM Radio channel, country's most popular newspaper and the full power of media, you launch a portal spend millions on it, you write fake articles that the most popular portal in India is yours, You create a hype. Millions of people come to your site only to find that your email service shows an error every minute. Your forums are spammed... your customer support barely replies... overall a very very poor portal.
Rediff is better but not the best. Indian portals have a lot of scope. The only problem is CEO's who know where and how to market their portal do not know how to maintain the quality of the portal and vise versa.
I have myself been to Rediff when recently they started the hosting business I had been to the conference but to my surprise the tech guys knew a lot less than me. They claimed unlimited bandwidth on all hosting plans when we spoke to tech team if we transfer a corporates website on the servers how they are going to handle the load( 1 GB an hour) they took us online to the guy in the VSNL data center who then explained that the servers can not handle over 10 MBPS load. The point here is that the guys do not have decent tech backup and they are tyring to become the number 1 hosting company of India. And yes in the paid email service the user still cannot change the password ( what the hell ).
They copied the concept of Adsence only to keep the minimum bid of 10 Rs. ( almost 22 cents) god only know who did the research for them that Indian advertisers will be ready to pay a rate 4 times higher than google adsense. Indian are still not very comfortable with online advertising... you've spent so much in developing a system and you are the only portal in the country that is offering this feature yet you are not encouraging people to advertise on your portal.
But still rediff is better than IndiaTimes as at least their free email service is great(can change the password). Its actually great. and I have never seen a error except on the members home page section (its something like geocities in yahoo).
On the other hand India Times is surviving only because of the mobile service ( 8888 service ) they have contacts and they are really aggressive as far as mobile services are concerned. But otherwise its the worst portal ever made.
However according to me that champ is still Mr. Yahoo they have best service across the portal its just that the have not been able to interact with people to create a hype in the college students that contributes to max net users, but at least they have a collaboration with shaadi.com and maybe with naukri.com also. Their promotions are not offline, and without going offline you can't win Indians.
According to me:
Yahoo is great
Indiatimes is worst
Rediff has big pockets but they need guidance.
Sify is lost(almost dead)
Thanks
Bye
I also met with Ajit, but didn't get enough of his time.
My overall impression is that the market needs to decide, rather than hoping for portal operators to have the agility or desire to change.
