30 Minute Interview

Connecting through multimedia

Rediff.com has come up with new initiatives on the lines of social networking to help you make friends via multimedia content. Manish Agarwal, Vice President –Marketing, Rediff.com talks to Kushal Shah about iShare and blogshowcase.

Manish Agarwal

The Internet in India and abroad

India is probably the fastest growing Internet market in the world with a growth rate of around 31 percent and 25 million users. We rank number seven with the prospect of reaching number three or four behind China and the US in a few years. We find a common trend of collaborative platforms in India and abroad. The fashion of connecting with each other with the help Web 2.0 Web sites is growing around the world and we see the same in India as well. So the craze for social networking sites and similar activities among Indian Internet users are in sync with the rest of the world. Indian broadband is growing at more than 60 percent with around 2.65 million broadband users present currently. With this number, the need for people to rely on dialup connections is going away and with the help of their 2 Mbps connections, they are willing to experiment with audio and video streaming. It’s a matter of time before each one of us will be able to do video streaming and watch sitcoms online.

iShare: Connecting through multimedia

Rediff has a huge community with millions of people connecting through it. People are continuously capturing images and videos. They have a large database of music. What they want is a platform where they can upload this media and share it with people who have similar interests or want to see this content. So we came up with this social networking tool called iShare. If we see other sites which have come after Orkut, they have not been able to survive in this already exploited terrain. What we studied is that a user after meeting friends on Orkut is limited to scrapping and after a while they need another reason to come back. They want some new people with whom they can connect. They want a platform where users can connect to each other via audio and video and other multimedia content and based on uploads and work done by them in life. The primary difference between us and other sites is that, on other sites people look for a person and here people look for content and based on that content they look for connections and make friends. To this end, we are even optimizing search engines. The concept of collaborative content and connecting using this content are going to survive in the future. Further, we are really paranoid about making this work even on a data card. We are optimizing it in such a way that it’s not heavy and yet it looks good. Though it will not have high resolution and quality it will be optimal. For moderating content we have taken three measures, firstly, we have continuous third-party moderation for copyright and unacceptable content. Next, users can report abuse which will go to moderation team and they will kick it off. Lastly, as the popularity grows, self moderation will come into action with the help of self appointed moderators who will do the work of checking content for quality.

Blogshowcase

Blogging as an activity has really shaped up in India. We currently have various platforms where people blog. We have few bloggers and a high number of readers. In such a scenario we decided to act as a catalyst since it is unfair to ask them to blog on Rediff. A blogger is primarily motivated by traffic so we created a platform where one can continue to blog on the page but just provide Rediff with the RSS feed. So whenever you do an activity at your blog it automatically gets updated on blogshowcase. With this we are diverting the traffic also. The top blogger gets his name on the main page and that is gratifying for the blogger. What he also gets as a user is sharing of a topic easily and entries matching a particular topic from various sites will be present under one umbrella.

Spreading the word

We are targeting everybody in the internet space. For this we are running an online campaign. We are also using internal search for publicizing the same. We want to grow organically and word of mouth can serve as the biggest mode with the help of our millions of users. In terms of mainline publicity, we have started hoarding in Mumbai. The reason for choosing Mumbai is its Internet user population and the fact that the most tech savvy guys are here. They can help spread the word across India using the Internet. Other reason is that 90 percent of the media is in Mumbai and they can use this to reach out to the audience. My target is to grow faster than the market. I have more users on Rediff than those on Orkut but what I need is to rope them in for iShare and other services.