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MyToday launches seven news related mobile portals
The company plans to monetise its news portals after one year through advertising or the paid subscription model
MyToday, an SMS advertising service owned by Netcore Solutions, has launched seven news-related mobile portals.
Separate portals have been launched for business news (NayaBiz.mobi), cricket news (NayaCricket.mobi), sports news (NayaSports.mobi), technology news (NayaTech.mobi), film information (NayaMovies.mobi), world news (NayaWorld.mobi) and general news (NayaNews.mobi).
A mobile portal called NayaNaya.mobi has also been launched, which is basically an aggregation of all these mobile portals.
All the portals can be accessed on GPRS enabled mobiles as well as on a personal computer. The portals are targeted at people who want to consume news in their free time or while they are on the move.
Rajesh Jain |
The home page of each portal displays various news headlines in that category and also mentions the source from where the headline has been picked up. When the user clicks on a news headline, he is directed to a new page within the mobile portal, where he can read the article, both text and images, as provided in the RSS feed by the original website.
This implies that if a website embeds a text or image ad inside its RSS feeds, the ad will be displayed on the MyToday news portals as well. The company is also offering an option to users to read the article on the original website.
Speaking to afaqs!, Rajesh Jain, managing director, Netcore Solutions, says, “Initially, we will build the audience around these portals. Later, we have ideas and plans to monetise the portals. This can happen through ads or by offering the news portals on a subscription based model. The most important objective of launching these portals is to drive the use of mobile Internet.”
Jain says the monetisation process will start only after a year.
Netcore Solutions will initially promote the portals through word of mouth advertising and by informing the four million mobile users who subscribe to the MyToday daily SMS alert service about it.