This one is strictly for those chronicling the history of the Net. The category of dotcom advertising — advertising by dotcoms and Internet service providers (ISPs) — will have virtually vanished by next year. "Substantially reduced," is how
S. Swaminathan, Vice-President of I-Contract, an online ad agency, reads it. But 2000 was a memorable year for this category.

Flush with VC funds, dotcoms pumped in Rs 349.87 crore into press and television advertising in 2000 as per ORG data for 991 dotcoms and ISPs.

Press took the bigger piece of the pie, raking in Rs 256.7 crore. Television's total take was about Rs 93.1 crore. Of course, since ORG tracks rate card rates, the actual spends can be easily discounted by about 40%. (In TV advertising, discounts are often as high as 60% for big spenders.) At Rs 136.26 crore, the top 10 spenders contributed 38.94% of the total spends. And at Rs 240.26 crore, the top 50 dotcoms contributed almost 68.67% of the total ad spend.

The top 10 spenders were the usual suspects: a general mix of portals, financial sites, one B2B marketplace... the leading Indian portal Rediff.com is at number four. But, clearly, being one of the top 10 spenders has not ensured survival or good fortune. It's not clear whether Zeenext.com, a general portal and one of Subhash Chandra's various forays beyond media, is still on. And S. Kumars' franchisee-driven e-commerce thrust — on the basis of which it went public last year — is yet to get off the ground. Go4i lost its CEO Piyush Gupta last year to his original employer, Citibank. Indya.com has not released any figures at all on its page views or revenues, (market estimates put page views at about 15 to 20 million, compared to Rediff.com's 150 million). The list goes on....

Conversely, some of the more successful dotcoms have been those which have relied entirely on word of mouth — or viral marketing—to attract visitors to the site. They come low down in this ORG ranking — some don't even figure in the list. For instance, Hungama.com, one of the stronger entertainment sites around, is number 749 on the list with a measly ad spend of Rs 44,000. Contest2Win, also a key entertainment site, is 112 on the list with an ad spend of Rs 5.2 lakh. The big daddies of dotcoms also have lean budgets. MSN Hotmail is number 277 on the list with an ad spend of Rs 11 lakh and Yahoo.co.in clocks in at number 72 with Rs 93 lakh.

These numbers explain why advertising sources figure that spending by this category will drop by more than 50% this year as consolidation quickens and funds peter out. A lot of the promotional work is likely to move online as the sites find novel ways to target the existing user base more effectively.



But Did The Users Tune In?

Dipstick surveys show that advertising and promotional expenses account for 50% of total costs of a dotcom. What are the chances that the user is actually listening? Not high, according to a Gartner Consulting survey. It concluded that users rarely visited new sites, and word of mouth was still the main reason they tried out new sites.

Another study done by Indiameter.com, an online usage-behaviour tracking service, busts the popularly held perception that people increase their search efforts once they become comfortable with the Net. Data collected by Indiameter suggests that users prefer to stick to core sites — which vary from one to three — on which they spend more than 50% of their time. The chances of displacing them isn't always a question of bigger advertising buck as most Indian sites will have realised last year. That's why concepts of first mover advantage and stickiness are so relevant in the Net space. While core sites like Yahoo! Have turned cash positive, second-tier ones like Altavista are yet to do so.