ibibo January 25, 2008
Posted by Pallav Sharda in : Social Networking , trackbackIf you’ve read eIndia reviews before, you know that I don’t pound on sites that have the ‘beta’ sign up. Fortunately, with ibibo I didn’t have many reasons to do so anyway.
Ibibo gives a local flavor to ongoing social networking frenzy. Ibibo users can create blogs, polls, share opinions, reviews, photos, ask questions (and answer), search jobs and play games. So… pretty much everything except walking your dog for you. They did try to justify the name ibibo as “I build, I bond”… which is a bit Julius Casear-ish for me. The registration is free, and they are upfront about their business model “…core revenue model will be driven by serving targeted advertising”. I didn’t see any advertisements on the site, so probably they are still ramping up on sales effort. Which tells you something about this business model- you better be prepared to survive for a long time (?years) before advertisers will hand over the cash.
Launched in early 2007, the site has grown to a monthly visitor count between 20-25K (source: compete.com data). Pretty impressive. The site is good-looking (relatively speaking) and easy to navigate, so that may be a reason for it’s popularity. Of course, the deep-pocket based tactics of TV ads and news media coverage helps too. Ibibo is backed by MIH Group, which is owned by Naspers (for a org chart, go here). MIH Group is a multinational media company with internet properties for China, Russia etc. In late 2006, MIH decided to get serious about Indian Internet space. After a few acquisitions, they now own pixrat, Bixee, ApnaMarket, OneFamily, Dwaar, QuestionBank.net. More on them in future.
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