Indian Woman Starts Million Rupee Homepage
A 28-year-old Indian woman who last December started www.crorepatipage.com, an advertising billboard on the Internet for Indians alone, has already earned around $5000, not an insignificant sum in India, The Hindu Business Line reports.
Sunaina Bansal hopes to emulate the success of Briton Alex Tew’s Million Dollar Home Page from which Tew reportedly earned a million dollars. ‘Crorepati’ is a Hindi word that means ‘One who owns a crore of Rupees.’ A crore is equal to 10 million, so a crore of rupees would be about $227,272. The better-known advertisers on Bansal’s page are matrimonial site Shaadi.com, engineering conglomerate Kirloskar and rediff.com.
Bansal started the page offering one million pixels — that will remain active for a minimum of five years –for 10 rupees each, which is 23 cents. Advertisers can buy these pixels in 100 pixel-squares measuring 10 by 10 pixels and the page has been designed to have 10,000 of 100 pixel squares. A click on each advertisement or slogan links visitors to the advertiser’s Web page.
“If a housewife like me can harness the power of the Internet to make a revolution, I am confident that Indian women of today can get increasingly familiar with this new medium and join in boosting the Indian Internet community,” Bansal says, adding that she would like to influence Indian women, “to gear up and join in the Internet revolution in India.”
Does this kind of gimmick work? It seems like most advertisers on Tew’s site did it because they knew it would attract a lot of publicity. So the dozens of copycat sites spawned by Tew’s success would not have done as well as they couldn’t beat having Tew’s first-mover advantage.
Update: Due to my mistake, we used the million dollar page, instead of a million rupee page in the headline – Om
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Old news.Oh please, dumb copy.Not worth space on GigaOm.
This isn’t the only Indian copy of the Million Dollar Page. There is also http://www.lakhpatipage.com/ at Re. 1 a block. What’s really strange about lakhpatipage is that the seems to be looking to make only Rs. 10001 (~ $227) from it. There’s a Shaadi.com advertisement there too.
And about the “getting the Indian women on to the net” bit – she could have just smiiled for the camera and said “World Peace”. That and the “By an Indian woman. For the Indian People” tagline is just the kind of fallacious appeal to emotions that I dislike. Smart tactic, maybe.
Old news and worthless story. Cant indian come up with original and intuitives ideas themselves rather than copying the rest of the world. Also bad reporting by Shailaja, who obviously doesn’t have a clue about what it takes to be a journalist.
There is no need to attack the author.We are not in chat room.
It wasn’t old news to me.
And while there is copying of ideas in India, let me point out that it happens everywhere. Europe had 10 rip-offs of eBay. They copy all the leading internet site. So do South American companies and companies in Asia (India included). I’ve met founders who proudly say “We are the of Europe”. So, please, has nothing to do with Indians – has to do with the eagerness of trying to replicate a model that works (sometimes with little success).
To be clear, Europe does have unique sites that aren’t copies of anything and so does India.
well, here’s one copycat that got more financial traction already:
http://www.neftepixel.ru
with – as i understand it, and the site managers’ a neighbor, good old fashioned sales technique.
ahh, well :-)
Does this story even deserve mention on GigaOM ? I am very surprised.
Almost all the stories from India are rehash of news stories appearing in Indian newspapers or magazine, does this really add any value to Gigaom.
Pradeep, same feelings here. – Vijay
It’s only a model a that works when it’s original and gets press, and it’s silly posts like this that make these idiotic ideas work. Stop talking about them, and no one will buy any ad space.