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If it were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world — with over 398 million consumers across the globe. Each day, it delivers 18 times more mail than FedEx and has the highest usage amongst all other Internet sites in India. The Network delivered 2.4 billion page impressions in July 2005 to India. It has 14.8 million unique users vesting the Network from India in a month: 69 per cent of the online monthly population in India. The latest IMRB report shows it as having the highest awareness amongst Internet users in India (scoring a whopping 60 per cent+ in awareness levels) that is way above other competitors in the Indian market.
Who else but Yahoo! could possibly have pulled that one off? IMRB's recent study (the above findings are from it) of Yahoo! India revealed that its TOM (Top Of Mind) recall rate is the highest, while Indiatimes and MSN are distant followers. It is also showed that Yahoo! India is not only the most common website used for chatting, but also the most common IM (Instant Messenger) platform used. MSN was a far third.
The man behind it all, Neville Taraporewalla, Country General Manager, Yahoo! India, speaks to deepti khanna bose. Excerpts..
How is Yahoo! India doing?
You know, we started in 2000, and we had a good year; we had some bad years — 2001-2002 were not exceptionally good because they coincided with the dot com bust. The end of 2002 was our lowest ebb and after that, we did restructuring within the organisation. And since 2003 — to answer your question — we have been profitable every quarter. We mapped our resources based on the business that was in the market then. And since then, we have consistently grown overall both in terms of the users who come to the Yahoo! India portal; and the sum total of advertisers and marketers, who use the Yahoo! portal to target and reach out to their consumers. I personally believe that digital media —particularly the Internet — is here to stay. It's very clear that the audience is growing. And we are a market leader, in terms of various portal offerings that we have. So, Yahoo India has been doing well and we plan to further invest: in terms of business; in terms of infrastructure. Manpower wise, we're planning on expanding about two-fold and we will get the best talent in the business. In addition to that, we're also looking for a core senior management team, to scale up the business much faster in the next couple of years. So you will be seeing a lot more of Yahoo! in the year 2006.
Why all this new communication for Yahoo! Mail, when already in most people's minds, Yahoo=E-Mail?
If you see a recent survey done by IMRB, it talks about the level of engagement of Internet users in India — for over 70 per cent, the single biggest activity they do, is send and receive e-mails. And that is why, though users log on for different types of content. The largest consumption on our portal is of the Yahoo! Mail service. That's why a lot of people ask me about this new Mail campaign that we've just launched; it's a function of the fact that for over 70 per cent of Internet consumers, using e-mail is their primary activity. There is no better product than the Yahoo! Mail product, which pushes through better. The fact is that recently we've done a whole lot of product upgrades within the Yahoo! Mail service, which is one of its kind and not available among any of the competitors. The fact is that we are a superior service compared to all other competitors, and we felt that on a scale of 1 to 10, we are also on the higher side of the scale as far as product features, as compared to anybody else. Therefore it was important for us to talk about new aspects of the Yahoo! Mail, acquire more customers — new sets of customers who have recently started using the Internet — because we believed there was an opportunity for us, so we went ahead with it.
Has your new campaign delivered?
The new campaign has done well; it was just released in July. We've had a very good August in terms of new activations and increase in page views. We are monitoring the campaign and have acquired more registered users in comparison to the previous months; so I'd say the campaign has been very successful with the target audience we had planned it for. As for our advertisers, it has also delivered on that; and at the end of the campaign — which is the third month — we will evaluate its three-month performance. So far it has been very positive.
Why did Yahoo! India sign up Malaika Arora Khan as a brand ambassador?
I've been asked that question a lot. We never looked at her from a 'brand ambassador' point of view. If you look at the campaign, we've used six different people; the idea was to have people who are all from different walks of life. You have a girl, who is a student; a young guy who is a businessman, a father, and a celebrity (Malaika Arora), amongst other people.
Then why do you have Malaika on the sign-in page for Yahoo! India Mail?
What we thought (when we signed her up) was to extend her image to a couple of other things that we do, and putting her on the sign-n page was just one of those things. I don't know what you feel about her, but I think she looks wonderful. There was no other 'angle' to it; we wanted someone who was energetic, photogenic, and spontaneous for whatever it was we were going to do. So it came out of that. And then, we extended it to Malaika series for Yahoo! Mobile downloads. It's custom-made for mobile phones; this is the first time anyone's done something like this, where they've actually shot all the images only to be downloaded on mobile phoned. She modelled for it, Atul Kasbekar shot it, and if you see, it has Yahoo! branding and her autograph; it's the 'Malaika Signature Series' as we call it, and can actually be downloaded onto your mobile phone as a theme, and it's also animated!
A couple of days ago, The New York Times reported that Yahoo! had just hired some war correspondents/journalists. Do you have any such initiatives planned for Yahoo! India?
It's part of an overall strategy; we recently had Lloyd Brown join us for various things. And obviously, there is a move towards how we package content towards our customers. It was all part of that strategic move. How that gets rolled out in different markets is still too early to say... but I feel it is a beginning and see it happening in various markets. Every market is so different; there is so much stuff we can do in India, and be given the bandwidth and all the resources to do to.
How is Yahoo! India Mail doing versus its other e-mail service competitors in India?
Let's not just talk about e-mail, ok? We are a portal, which that offers content, plus communication. If you look at the Yahoo! Portal offerings, our home-page is a very big page. We have been used for cricket, finance and …
To read the entire article, buy a copy of Impact Advertising and Marketing magazine dated September 19-25