Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Indian e-commerce boom forecast

Both contentsutra.com and VentureWoods report on the latest Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) report which forecasts a 30% boom in e-commerce from 2006/07 to 2007/08. Contentsutra notes that this will be driven by "strength in the classifieds, subscription and downloads businesses" while VentureWoods comments that "the high base effect of online travel is coming into play (almost accounting for 65-70% of the market)".

Highlighted sectors include:

  • Online travel: up 27%
  • Online classifieds: up 52%
  • Paid content: up 50%
  • Digital downloads: up 50%
  • Online retail: up 30%
The paid content line there may catch some our publisher readers by suprise. It's from a pretty low base: Rs30 (US$7.6 million) crores is predicted, from Rs20 crores. Online travel, by contrast is predicted to hit Rs7,000 crores (US$1.783 billion).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Indian Advertisers held to Ransom by IBF

The festive season is on and this is buzzing time for all advertisers in the Indian advertising industry. Bang on this time all TV channels have unilaterally decided to increase rates by 25% through a surcharge route across all current and new deals...
This makes it incredibly difficult for all advertisers to even digest this very fact leave alone the notion of implementing it. This is a tragic and historic event going on in the Indian media industry which leaves all advertisers high and dry, when they should be raking in money during festive season sales.
HOW CAN SOMETHING LIKE THIS TO HAPPEN....? Don’t tell me this is Hitler’s era in the Indian media Industry.
AAAI which is the agencies association has completely opposed to this entire hullabaloo and indicated that most of the clients are dead against the surcharge. They have also written to all IBF member channels the schedules be carried uninterrupted as per pre-agreed terms without any surcharges. As this goes on, some clients have already threatened legal action against channels if their spots are not carried as per schedule.
AAAI categorically refuses channels acting in unison and increasing rates by fixed percentage by certain rates as against the idea of IBF advising its member channels to renege on existing agreement deals. As this drama goes on, IBF is allowing PSU and Govt clients to advertise without surcharge. They are also incentivizing clients to come directly to them by not applying the surcharge and running on existing rates. They have gone ahead and also accepting campaign from non AAAI agencies with a lower surcharge of 10%.
Hmmmm..... this gets murkier day by day.
More confusion….IBF has now announced 1 month waiver for advertisers complying to the surcharge and exempting southern TV channels (who have decided against IBF here)….again witness the arbitrary approach taken by IBF here.
What seemed to be rates disagreement earlier now seems to be a divide and rule policy only that it is not implemented by Britishers anymore but a funny Indian association called IBF.
ISA (Indian Society of Advertisers) has also completely trashed this whole idea of surcharges which do not make any sense.
Finally, what no one realizes is that, it hits us as consumers cos it is a direct impediment in the communication process between the advertiser and consumers, by media channels which are just communication couriers. Imagine you not coming to know about a great product which you did wait for quite some time to buy....?