StartupAvenues

It looks like that Indian Internet portal Rediff.com (NASDAQ : REDF ) has taken a cue from Domain booking & Web Hosting company Godaddy (Godaddy’s commercial during Superbowl was banned due to wardrobe malfunction and thus created quite a controversy and visibility for Godady) and has decided to release a quite racy advertisement to promote its newly launched unlimited storage email facility where two hot girls discuss about size of their colleague???

The advertisements shows two girls having a conversation about something big that their colleague, Raju, has. They ask each other in amazement, ‘Is it really that big?’ The shot moves to the rest of the office, where other employees are also wondering about Raju’s big thing. Finally, one of them asks Raju, ‘Is it really that big?’ Fed up with all the gossip, Raju replies, ‘It’s not big, it’s unlimited.’ The ad ends with a voiceover saying, ‘Rediffmail with free unlimited storage space. Big enough for anything.’

Quite a advertisement for email services by Rediff which has been promoted by advertising agency Rediffusion and takes its name from it.

Rediff.com, founded in 1996 and listed at NASDAQ, was one of the first Indian portals which tasted success but seems to have been withering away since then due to lack of any clear cut strategy and business direction.

Rediff which right now feature more on CAT preparation and investment tips on home page seems to be trying hard to capture some space and of the late has become a champion of me too products but has so far not able to do even one with much success on account of bad execution. Yahoo answers ~ Rediff Q&A, Bogspot – Rediffblogs, Adwords ~ Pay4clicks, Google news – rediff news, and travel, books, matchmaker and list is on and on …….

In its initial phase, Rediff tried to be a online bookstore taking a cue from Amazon.com but by 2002 has shifted its focus on search and ran major campaigns about Rediff lightening search and now seems to have shifted its focus on email where it has been competing as a also ran category. At present mails in India is dominated by Yahoo and Gmail and with Gmail now coming out of beta and available to everyone, presents quite a big challenge to Yahoo and other emails providers ( read Indiatimes and rediff) as it has ever increasing quota and offers much more sophisticated service with its thread structure and search facility and has incidently never advertised its hugely popular email service.

Community services Connexions is still under beta stage and does not count any significant space while rediff blogs though in market for couple of years is yet to make any dent as market is lead by blogspot and wordpress.com.

Rediff recently launched many other initiatives like Rediff jobs, Travel, Finance and Rediff text advertising service (similar to Google in look but without context) but has not been able to be a category winner in any of these due to delayed launches and lack of focus. Indian internet market which seems to be again in light on account of success of Naukri.com ( its market cap is around INR 20 billion with a top line of around INR 1000 million has made much success compared to Rediff as naukri was a struggling in dotcom in 2002 while Rediff was listed on NASDAQ at that point of time).

Problem with Rediff is that it si not very sure the space it wants to be. Is it a content provider or services or a pure content aggregator / distributor?? So far it seems to be going to be a one stop place which gets content from all place depending upon mood of season and home page is dominated by stories from cricket to CAT to Indian film industry heroines and supported by loads of services. But if it is content aggregator then it has just failed to capture emerging trends and seems to be still going by web 1.0 methods of getting content through tie ups and republishing without any social networking impact.

Probably what it needs is a racy visionary in internet space than a racy advertisement for a email service!!!!!