Dotcom Marketing in India

TABLE I
AD SPENDS BY DOTCOMS DURING OCT 1999-JAN 2000

Media	Amount in Rs. million
Television	100
Print	350
Outdoor	50
Total	500

Source: Businessworld, March 20, 2000.

Evolution of Portals

In the early days of the Net revolution, there was a rush to get online. Most companies established their presence through corporate websites. Companies used the Net as a new low-cost channel, with unlimited reach. Corporate websites used the Net primarily to extend their reach and attract customers to their products. Customers had more information and more choices than ever before. As websites grew in number, it became difficult for customers to search for sites of their choice. Search engines thus emerged and became key players directing millions of surfers to various sites.

Web commuters found a unique value addition as they could go and search for any product or service from any part of the world by just clicking the mouse. The phenomenal growth of search engines was accompanied by unprecedented choices opening up for the customer. This growth led to the transformation of search directories into portals.

The competition was redefined. Instead of competing on width offered by horizontal portals, players were forced to compete on depth.

While reach was taken for granted, the richness of content, the way one presented one's products and provided information and strong community features like chat rooms, discussion groups emails etc. became the recipe for success.

This led to the emergence of vortals or "vertical" industry portals and "segment" portals. Vertical portals were sites devoted to a single industry or function: for example insurance content sites, personal financial services sites and sites that attracted consumers to buy health or auto insurance. In each case, the revenue model was primarily based on advertising, with some transaction revenue from online sales (Refer Exhibit I for different business models). Segment portals were subsites of the horizontal portals; an example was Yahoo! Finance, a finance site of Yahoo!. Such portals offered focused searching capabilities to Internet users interested only in a single range of products.

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Case Details

Case Code : ITSY006
Themes: e-Business
Case Length : 08 Pages
Period : 1990-2001
Organization : Equus Advertising, Hungama.com
Pub Date : 2002
Teaching Note : Available
Countries : India
Industry : Information Technology (Electronic Commerce)

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