Chandamama CEO L. Subramanyan, in an interview with Mint, says that the company is eying triple digit growth. No revenue projections for the website, which they’ve only recently acquired control of. Subramanyan says that they’ll offer freebies to gain traffic for their site, and maybe look at options like personalized comic strips, advertising on comics and sponsored comics for monetization. Advertising isn’t a priority for the site now. The childrens publication currently has rights to 25 characters and a library of 16,000 stories, but importantly, isn’t beyond creating new IP (new characters). Subramanyan denies knowledge of Walt Disney’s (NYSE: DIS) offer to buy-out Chandamama for Rs. 20 crore (Ed: as per our sources there was an offer from Disney, but turned down). Chandamama is in talks with operators to roll out mobile content in a few weeks, and could also launch audio stories on a radio channel by end January. Much more on their overall plans here.
The Chandamama site has integrated a Q&A, powered by Rediff Q&A. Surprisingly, there’s no moderation of questions or signup required for a feature for a children’s site…though one can report abuse. I posted a nonsensical question, here. Chandamama has also recently integrated an instant messenger into the site – predictably, parent company Geodesic‘s Mundu IM, hoping that children will use it to share and discuss stories…the Mundu IM add-on didn’t work with Opera or Firefox. Works with IE, and here’s a screencap of how it looks.
Comments have been disabled for this post