I logged on to ibibo.com a couple of hours ago to check if there’s anything new, and noticed that they’ve launched a television show called iSuperstar in collaboration with MTV India. It’s a dance based reality show, with contestants from the social media portal itself. From the site, it appears that offline auditions will be in Mumbai, Delhi and Lucknow. MTV VJ Sophie has a blog on the site, quite a few questions are being asked here at ibibo Sawaal, and there’s a video promoting the competition on YouTube, here. The MIH owned company has been quite active on the marketing front over the past few months, looking to acquire users with TV advertising and tie-ups. I spoke to Ibibo CEO Ashish Kashyap on their products, marketing strategy and plans for monetization:
What is iSuperstar all about?
iSuperstar is an application on ibibo, and we hope it will start off a chain reaction: you write about which Bollywood star you would like to dance like, and then your friend do the same, and it spreads. You blog and ask questions. Eventually some people will be shortlisted, and will be called for a below-the-line audition. 18 ibibo users will be selected for the reality show. Only users from the ibibo community will be allowed to vote. (Ed: this is likely to drive signups)
So it must be a huge cost for you, since the entire TV show is yours?
It’s a partnership with MTV. Since we released it online a couple of hours ago, 720 people have enrolled for it. We think it adds huge value for the partnering media channel too, since it gives users an opportunity to express themselves on the medium as well.
How will it help generate revenue for you?
Right now we’re not getting a sponsor on board, but as we go along, we’ll get partners. All such activities are monetizatible. The applications are monetizable too.
But is advertising really working on social networking portals? There are fears that they just aren’t generating enough click-throughs…
We don’t want to do advertising based on click-throughs on users personal pages; we will look at branded applications. Advertising is possible on content pages where the click-throughs are fine. It works on Q&A pages too. We’ll have to learn and evolve, and see if we can involve the brands more clearly. It was one of your predictions and we also really believe in the Cross Media strategy.
More in the extended text
You’ve recently launched a slew of marketing initiatives. Is ibibo complete as a product, and are you now focusing on acquiring users?
We went to the market after acquiring a million registered users: so it’s not like we did marketing without a community already there. The platform is ready, but product will keep evolving. We’ll focus on innovation: the way we brought answers into the social graph was really innovative. Everything needs to come under the social graph. If you play around with the product, you’ll figure out that we’ve done what a lot of people haven’t done.
What’s been the impact of marketing campaign?
Page-views have gone up daily by 4-5 times. Signups have increased by 3 times, and more users are doing more. Each user session is contributing to more page views. Things like Public ka Vittmantri, and activities around the Chak De India girls have driven a lot of genuine profiles. What’s interesting is that 57 percent of our users are from outside the metros. Also, after the marketing campaign, people have sampled our photos product and we’ve got really good content there in the last 25-30 days. In fact, ibibo photos is available on Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Live as well.
What else is new on ibibo?
We’ve also launched a multilingual news search – I think it’s India’s first. We’ll launch personalization features on that.
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