Tencent Invests in MIH Internet – ibibo + dwaar + onefamily .com
Tencent Holdings has announced an USD 7.5 Mn investment over a 3 year period in MIH India Global Internet, promoter of Indian Social Networking site – ibibo.com, local search engine dwaar.com and a family tree portal onefamily.com.
Naspers Limited promoter of MIH India Global Internet holds substantial equity in Tencent Holdings and thus this indirect equity infusion with some technology transfer too.
Tencent has the right to subscribe for new shares up to the maximum amount resulting in its holding 50% shareholding of MIH India Global Internet minus one share, with conditions on assuming certain loans. This deal is part of a deliberate long-term strategy of securing strategic stakes in leading private companies in key companies that, like India, will likely become important Internet markets in Asia.
Tencent has granted MIH India Global Internet a perpetual and royalty-free license, mainly to use certain of Tencent’s software, content and trademarks, as well as some other unspecified materials, in India, for nil consideration.
Update: Financials of MIH India Global Internet
If you are wondering how much these startups maybe spending and earning here is a brief insight.
- Consolidated total assets of MIH India Global Internet were approximately Rs 320.82 million
- Net liabilities at the end of FY08 – Rs 741.58 million
- Consolidated net loss (after taxation and extraordinary tems) for the years ended 31 March 2008 and 31 March 2007 were approximately Rs 585.45 million and Rs 196.88 million
How Indian Social Networks are Monetizing on User Generated Content
Being a Google’s AdSense publisher for over a year and closely tracking this network, I am of the opinion that good quality user generated content [UGC] generates high revenue. Social Network have atleast 35% quality UGC inventory and hence can cash-in on this. Hence, we conducted an agile study on how social networks in India or networks targeted at Indians are monetizing user generated content.
- ApnaCircle – own Ad Network
- BharatStudent – Axill Ad network. Axill and BharatStudent are owned by Northgate Technologies.
- BigAdda – Using part of Reliance Entertainment’s Zapak Ad network and Google’s Adsense
- Campus18 – from TV18 group. No Ads yet but other group websites such as Moneycontrol.com is a premium AdSense publisher.
- DesiMartini – Zedo. HindustanTimes is also powered by Zedo
- Facebook – Microsoft + NDTV
- Friendster – Indian Affiliates + Google’s Adsense
- Fropper – Google’s AdSense
- goYaar – N/A
- HumSubka.com – Using AdsforIndians network which pulls classifieds ads at times from some classifieds site.
- ibibo – RealMedia network
- IndyaRocks – Google’s Adsense
- Jhoom – doomed social network
- MingleBox – none
- Myspace India – Google’s Adsense
- Orkut – Google’s Adsense
- saffronconnect – got disconnected
- Sunsilkgangofgirls – none. In the past, has ran campaign about Hindustan Unilever products.
- Yaari – Google’s AdSense
- Yo4Ya – none
7 of the 20 networks depend on Google’s AdSense for monetization and is an acceptable number though we would really like to see more networks sign-up with Google. [Mere number of networks may not make sense, but number of pages, time spent, and other attributes should tell a better story. Since none of the networks disclose these stats, its impossible to know the real facts] Apart from Google’s Adsense, no two social networks in India have the same Advertising platform. Can any Indian company really accept Google’s challenge ?
Directi’s Skenzo raises funding from Ashmore Group
Skenzo – a leading provider of technology, in the traffic monetization business, has raised undisclosed significant funding parting a very small stake. Skenzo is Directi Business Unit / Subsidiary.
Skenzo was the fastest growing domain parking company worldwide for 2006 & 2007. They also claim that they are globally number one in domain parking. [I am not quiet sure of this claim] Divyank Turakhia, Co-Founder of Skenzo said,
We are very bullish about the Direct Navigation Industry. We plan to deploy sizeable resources for building unparalleled technology products in the direct navigation, online traffic monetization and advertising spaces.
J. Michale Lind of Ashmore group said,
In a short span of time Skenzo has become one of the strongest players in the traffic monetization industry. We believe the Skenzo team has done a terrific job. We are very excited about this investment and are looking forward to working in close partnership with Skenzo to help further accelerate its growth and strengthen its leadership position.
Directi is doing brisk business in the domain name industry and have always offered value to customer. However, they had a glitch in their system last evening at 5:30PM which restrained customers from grabbing .asia domain names. I paid a 80% premium and bought Convergence.Asia through GoDaddy.
Citipals ports MovieMatch to facebook platform
Last month while covering Citipals.com [Network of Trusted Reviewers] I had asked them about the idea of porting their reviews to social networks. Bingo! the team has done an excellent job in taking the Movie Match / reviews vertical online to facebook and I speculate they maybe porting it to more networks 
Here is a release from Citipals. Here is what Ashish had to say in an e-mail,
Inline with your suggestion, we have now launched a facebook app.Thanks very much for your candid feedback earlier and will appreciate the same even now.
Ashish, you are most welcome. You are way too experienced than I am, and I am sure you have more innovation in store for the community
Other Web 2.0 app owners, like it or not, large networks now form the Web 2.0 platform and you might want to port / interact with them to reach aliens in Mars 
In case of Citipals, they are now reaching wider audience and are accumulating more user generated content from different networks on to Citipals.com
Facebook App sold + Asia’s Young Entrepreneurs
Mark set Developers on fire opening the facebook platform early this fall. Since then Developers have been writing and deploying applications. Friendhugs is the first facebook App that was sold by the developer to some private party for $21,500. Friendhugs used Amazon’s Hardware / Internet as a service platform [EC2] and had 240,000 installs. He made $100 a day in revenue via appsaholic on 40K impressions per day. Web 2.0 platform is the new place for your next Jackpot However, prevent facebook from stealing your idea and launching a competing service. [Recall how Alexa pulled the plug on Alexaholic and later settled after community backlash ? ]
Carwale.Com and IndiaGames.com founders have made it to BusinessWeek’s Asia’s Young Entrepreneurs Award. There are more, you can choose whom you want to.
CitiPals – A Network of Trusted Reviews for your city
We have had more than a dozen social networks targeted @ various Indians. Ashish Baluda and his brother Manish have come up with a new network, which borrows the concept of networking, listing and reviews for your city. Ashish said,
Opinions of reviewers are good but opinions from your “friends” are priceless to help you make the right choice. There’s an implicit level of trust you associate with folks you know. CitiPals captures this and provides trusted recommendations by weighing in your social network higher. Opinions of folks in your social network are not only weighted higher as you peruse information on CitiPals, they are also displayed prominently along with your ‘relationship map’ to that user. Your social network on CitiPals comprises of friends ( and their friends, up to 3 degrees ) as well as users you trust. Over time, you might start trusting some users whose opinions have helped you, and/or whose tastes are similar to yours. These are users you trusts, and CitiPals allows you to mark them as “trusted reviewer”, and include in your social network.
CitiPals currently covers covers food & dining, nightlife, health, wellness, beauty and movies and entertainment. Coverage is available for Mumbai and partly for Pune as well. Does this remind you of burrp! ? Indeed, similar concept except that CitiPals is building on the “Trust” relationship network. Additionally, CitiPals wants to aggregate content from other trusted Bloggers and Web 2.0 sites.
I asked Ashish, why couldn’t they build CitiPals as an application on top of an existing Social Networking site like Facebook where there are setablished networks, to which he said,
I guess one could look at Citipals that way. But we essentially want it to be more than that. Just like MovieMatch is a fun application, we will be building more applications on top of the platform. We will in the future build some of our applications to work on facebook but to rely upon facebook for registration might not work. They are not the de facto and other sites don’t have APIs yet.
So burrp! now has a competitor I am sure even CitiPals have plans to go Mobileeee.
Feed
