MEDIA MATTERS
Going local
SEVANTI NINAN
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Localised and varied content is the key to market share on the Net.
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AS of last week Alexa.com, the web ranking site, listed two Indian entries in its rankings of the world's most popular 10 newspaper sites. At number seven was the Malayala Manorama, and at number nine the Times of India. The previous month, Manorama had been at number eight. The other inclusions on the list are more predictable: The New York Times and Washington Post, followed by USA Today, Sydney Morning Herald, the Wall Street Journal, and so on.
What does this tell us? That there are enough Keralites scattered around the world to make a difference. Manorama Online's chief executive officer told exchange4media.com earlier this month that close to 40 per cent of the page-views came from Malayalis in the U.S., 28 per cent from India, and 18 per cent from West Asia. But more importantly, it signals that the big Net market opening up is for regional language portals. The Web is set to replicate the trend seen in India in newspaper readership and satellite TV viewing. Once conditions are right, regional and local traffic will flower, because that is where the numbers are.
Enter the big names
The market-savvy big boys, not surprisingly, are among the first to jump on to the bandwagon. In February this year Yahoo announced that it had already introduced portals in seven Indian languages, explaining that its English language portal in India would only be able to address up to about 30 million users who are comfortable with English. If the company wanted to reach the hundreds of millions of Indians expected to be online in a few years' time, it had to localise.
More importantly, all players in this segment are keenly aware that advertising will increasingly target regional language audiences. In March this year Yahoo announced a partnership with Dainik Jagran for a Hindi language portal which would feature news and current affairs. English may be the dominant language of the Web, but that is set to change.
Yahoo is not the only player alert to the trend. In September last year, MSN India introduced five regional language portals, in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, and Kannada. America Online meanwhile was demonstrating similar savvy. Last year it first launched a Chinese language portal, and then AOL Latino, targeting the Hispanic market in the U.S.
That localisation is the way to gain numbers on the Net is a no-brainer, and Microsoft sensed that back in 2004 when it launched its Local Language Programme to create Language Interface Packs for its software.
Meanwhile, also last week, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that newspaper publishers in the West sense that the traffic to their websites is stagnating, though most major English language newspapers are investing heavily in their Internet presence. If numbers are beginning to come to language players it is both on account of accessibility, and broad-basing of content. And because of growing diasporas who have a lot more access to the Web than Indian language users do as yet.
Importance of content
Manorama Online does not presume that its visitors are interested in news alone. Look at what it offers: 22 plus channels in English and Malayalam, bilingual email, chat rooms, sections on Kerala ranging from travel to culture, photo galleries and video clips, shopping and subscription services. Also clips from Manorama's TV channel.
The Nayi Dunia group's Web Dunia, which describes itself as the world's first Hindi portal, similarly has channels for cookery, health, Bollywood, astrology and so on. Newspapers on the Web have the space to provide oodles of news-you-can-use. Moreover, it has a tie up with Tata Teleservices to offer a variety of applications on its network in 11 languages. That includes Oriya, Assamese and Punjabi.
Oneindia.in, meanwhile, says that they were the first to provide localised content in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. Other language players today include several in Oriya — Dharitri, OrissaGetway.Com, Orissasambad, Pragativadi and Samaya — Gujarat Samachar, and the Siasat Daily in Urdu.
The estimates for the number of Internet users in India vary greatly from 18 million users to 38 million, but one thing seems clear: language portals will be more in demand as Internet usage grows, and conversely, growth in Internet usage will flower with greater content availability in regional languages.
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