Nasdaq listed Jupiter Media is taking a cautious approach to India: the company’s Chairman and CEO Alan Meckler was in India for a couple of days – his first trip to the country – and I met him on Saturday to talk about their plans. Jupiter Media (NSDQ: JUPM) has two divisions – JupiterImages and JupiterOnlineMedia, and a fairly large number of properties, including Internet.com, MediaBistro.com, graphics.com; more on their bouquet of properties at this page. Excerpts from my discussion with Meckler:
What brings you to India?
I’ve come to India for three things – one is to hire an ad (sales) representative firm for our media properties. The second is for our images business: we will be announcing the launch of our image sales operations in India in a few weeks time. We have just hired a top Getty (NYSE: GYI) sales person, who is due to join in March. We intend to start small, and grow the business, and we believe we have the right assets for this market. I also came to meet our outsourcing partners in Bangalore and see the operations there. They have 15 people in Bangalore, and we intend to grow that to around 35 by this time next year.
What are your plans for the media business here?
Our media properties get a combined 1.1 million unique visitors, around 3.3 million page views from India. So we’re tying up with an ad rep firm – we have spoken to some, and will make our decision in a few weeks. We have plans for Internet.com, and if all goes well, we will launch india.internet.com by summer. The beauty of India is that we don’t need to do local language here, so we don’t need to invest much. One part of the media business that might work for us here is the online education business.
You appear to be rather cautious about your approach to the Indian market on the Media side…
In 1999, I opened up offices in Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and Japan. We also opened offices in England, Belgiun, Canada, among others, with around 3-4 people in each office. And then the bottom came off the Internet business and we had to shut down most offices. We just kept Sydney Germany and Japan. I want to be very careful this time.
Will you be launching MediaBistro here?
No, we wont. We might launch a job site – we have justtechjobs.com – but what’s different about us (from a site like Dice) is that we have a community and a job board plugged into it. We bought mediabistro last year for the jobs. With that technology, we’ll also launch a job board with graphics.com this year.
Update: Exchange4media reports that Ramji Ravindran has joined JupiterImages as Sales Director, South Asia and Dubai. He moves from Visage Media, which represents Getty Images, where he was National Sales Head, South Asia.
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