Leading Indian internet portals are initiating efforts to form a common body that would define metrics related to the online media.
The move is a first in the Indian market, and has special significance for online advertisers which till date does not have any regular and vouched-for data validating the user base of these portals.
The common body is expected be formed in the lines of Audit Bureau of Circulation for the print and TAM for the broadcast media.
Top executives at Yahoo! India and MSN India confirmed that an initial meeting took place a month back in Mumbai.
Neville Taraporewalla, director-sales & business development, Yahoo! India told Business Standard that representatives from Sify and rediff, the other two leading Internet portals in the country, also participated in the first round of meeting.
"Today, the online media in India has attained a critical mass of users, where it would be worthwhile to have an independent agency that would rate these portals in the country and define standards in terms of advertising format and other measurements," Taraporewalla said.
Though the association would be formed by the leading portals in the country, measurements and surveys are expected to conducted by an independent and reliable entity, which has no direct or vested interest.
The move to form a body is imperative in today's context, when advertisers and agencies do not have independent statistics on how popular the portals are in India.
The formation of an industry association is expected to provide authentic metrics on user base and profile that would help media planners.
Shriram Adukoorie of MSN India said, "There is already an equivalent of such a body called Internet Advertising Bureau outside India. (Online) advertisers in India would definitely feel more comfortable when such a body is formed for portals in India."
Earlier Saify Naqvi, director, TNE Systems Pvt. Ltd, a firm that helps corporates chalk their media plans, including the online medium said, "Today, there is no way to know who the market leader is. We have to rely to what ever Yahoo! and MSN claims about the number of unique visitors. Needless to say more often than not these numbers are exaggerated to paint a rosy picture."
MSN India and Yahoo! have different standards for measuring their user base. Adukoorie, said, "As far as MSN is concerned, if a registered user avails of more than two or three or our services, we would consider him a unique user."
Some of the services of MSN that are presently favourites among the Indian users includes, web mail service Hotmail, MSN Messenger, MSN Group and MSN Chat.
Yahoo! on the other hand counts every one of its registered users as part of its user base.
Taraporewalla said, "Our total registered users base today is around 30 million in India. Of this some 13.5 million are members of yahoo.co.in and the rest are members of www.yahoo.com. In internal assessments, we feel that close to 20 per cent of our registered users could be duplicated."
Duplicated users are those who hold multiple accounts with the same portal.
But according to sources in the Internet industry, the user base claimed by portals could be grossly exaggerated.
"According to an IMRB survey in January 2002, the total number of Internet users in India was only eight million, of which only 4.5 million were active users. Even if this number doubles annually, today the number of active Internet users cannot be more than 12 to 13 million in India."
