<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>Digital: Express thinks online, to revamp Expressindia.com</B></FONT>

It’s no secret that Indian newspapers have woken up to the fact that page impressions matter as much as circulation numbers. As readers get younger and attention spans diminish, newspapers are ramping up their web strategies. Over the past few months, we have seen a host of initiatives from ‘Hindustan Times’, ‘The Times of India’, ‘Dainik Jagran’ and ‘Business Standard’, to name a few.

Now, it’s the turn of the Indian Express Group to take this trend further. The publishers of the well-regarded `Indian Express’ run seven websites, including Expressindia.com, IndianExpress.com, FinancialExpress.com and Kashmir Live. It also runs seven websites for its business publication division, among them Expresspharmaonline.com and Expresscomputeronline.com.

Expressindia.com has seen many new features, especially over the past four months. Express Blogs has been redesigned. Free online classifieds, tenders and Express Q&A are some of the additions. The Q&A section has been powered by Rediff.com, which offers it to companies as a white-label product.

The Express group also plans to revamp the site towards the end of June 2007, according to Sanjeev Gera, business head, online operations at the group. “We want to develop Expressindia.com as a general interest horizontal portal – that’s what our intent has been all along. Currently, the visibility of the site is not very high, we will be promoting it through our publications,” he adds.

Gera adds that the content will be expanded to meet more varied interests of readers. The site also runs travel, shopping and astrology with partners, but a re-allocation of partners is expected soon. Gera expects page views to double over six months after the revamp, if “growth continues at a healthy pace”. At 18 million page views a month, that’s as healthy as healthy can get.

© 2007 agencyfaqs!