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Digital

MySpace appoints Deep Malhotra sales director for India

Malhotra will be involved in setting up a team to run the Indian operations and he will be responsible for roping in advertisers for the social network

MySpace.com, a social media site owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., is finally getting ready to formally launch an Indian version of its site in April. And it has appointed Deep Malhotra as director of sales in Mumbai.

Speaking to agencyfaqs!, Malhotra said, “I will be a part of the founding team which will launch the site in India. I will be involved in setting up a team and my role will also include educating advertisers about social media.”

Malhotra is currently working with Google India as group sales manager and he will join MySpace.com in April. He will report to Sung Lee, vice-president, Asia, MySpace.

MySpace appoints Deep Malhotra sales director for India
Deep Malhotra
Malhotra started his career as an entrepreneur. In 2000, he launched an online magazine called OnMag.com, which allowed users to submit poems, photographs, music and movies, which could be shared with media companies interested in hiring freelancers. OnMag.com was shut down in 2004.

In 2002, Malhotra went to study for an MBA degree. He joined Rediff.com in 2004 as manager, ad sales. He was responsible for selling ad inventory to advertisers. In 2005, he joined Google India as group sales manager and he was part of the team which set up Google’s advertising business in India.

Recently, MySpace also roped in Tarun Tripathi as director, marketing and content. Tripathi moved out from Yash Raj Films, where he was working as head of marketing.

Although MySpace has not formally launched its site in India, it has already launched a beta version at www.in.myspace.com. The beta site has a special community for Indians called IndiHub, where users can create blogs and participate in various fora. Currently, more than 62,000 members have joined the IndiHub community. It seems that MySpace.com will use local content and India specific features to counter the rising popularity of Facebook and Orkut in India.

Globally, MySpace.com leads over other social networking sites in terms of unique visitors. According to comScore, MySpace received 114 million total unique visitors in June 2007 as compared to 52 million unique visitors on Facebook.com and 24 million unique visitors on Orkut.com.

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