Net works for TV18

18 is leveraging its television audience to grow its Internet business.

In less than a year, Television 18 has signed on three new Internet ventures "� a recruitment portal, a travel portal and a home shopping portal. And there's more to come.

Five months into its English language news channel CNN IBN, the Rs 150 crore company believes the time is ripe for it to focus on the virtual world and leverage its universe of viewers.

Says Haresh Chawla, CEO, TV 18, "Through our various channels, we have an audience of 70 million adult decision-makers which we believe is a huge asset."

With the Internet being one of the fastest growing spaces, the marriage of the media and Internet is bound to happen, says Alok Shende, director, ICT, Frost & Sullivan, who believes that the possibilities for the two working as a combination are enormous.

He adds, "Over the next 12-18 months we will see many more of such tie-ups where companies will try to increase the yield from advertisers."

Of course it helps that Internet businesses can be lucrative: operating margins can be as high as 50 to 60 per cent for a content-based portal while for a transaction based portal, it would be slightly lower.

That's because while initially, the cost of acquiring subscribers is high, once a minimum threshold is crossed, the cost of servicing an additional subscriber is very low.

TV 18's three existing portals turned in revenues of Rs 11.1 crore in FY06 up from Rs 2.9 crore in FY06. What's important is that the company clocked around Rs 6 crore of revenues in the last quarter alone.

The most popular of them has been moneycontrol.com, which has emerged as one of the top five financial portals globally with over 150mn page views per month and five million unique users.

TV 18 plans to improve the services through more news alerts and SMS alerts and Chawla, without divulging any numbers, says advertising revenues should more than double in the current year.

Commoditiescontrol.com, a subscription-based portal, which has data flowing in from more than 100 mandis, should grow at than 100 per cent this year, he adds since it has now started supplying information to corporate users.

The other portal, poweryourtrade.com today has a subscriber base of 75,000 with fees ranging between Rs 1000-1200 per annum.

Having picked up a 50 per cent stake in the Indian arm of jobstreet.com, TV18 is entering the recruitment space. In a few years more than 15 mn people will be hitting the net for jobs, says Chawla adding that jobstreet's technological expertise and brand together with TV18's reach should make for a winning combination.

The travel portal, Yatra, in which TV 18 is partnering Norwest Venture Partners and Reliance Capital, will provide information on prices and availability for airlines and hotels and other services across 5000 cities.

The home shopping venture, a joint venture with SAIF Partners, which would be a part Internet and part television project, will kick off towards the end of the year.

Says Shende, "In a few years there will be communities building up around websites and if TV 18 can build scale , they can command good rates from advertisers looking for niche audiences."

With so many Internet projects in hand, and more in the pipeline, TV 18 plans to house them all in separate wholly-owned subsidiary.

"It will help us focus and extract the synergies better," observes Chawla, adding that it would also help attract funds from either strategic or financial investors. If the Internet continues to grow the way it is growing today, that should not be difficult.