Points of View: Will Rediff.com's bold revamp work?

Unlike other horizontal portals, Rediff.com has dared to offer minimalistic content and remove ads from its homepage

The Indian version of the 13-year-old horizontal portal Rediff.com has undergone a bold revamp. The redesign is a replication of Rediff.com's India Abroad site, which the company had revamped a few months back.

The new homepage of Rediff.com offers minimalistic content and acts as a gateway to access its content and services. It has a search bar, a few news stories and eight icons that represent different channels -- news, movies, cricket, money, shopping and its online services: Rediffmail, My Page and iShare.

The most surprising element of the redesign is the unavailability of advertising space on the homepage, which used to receive more than 1.6 million unique users and five million page views on a daily basis, as per industry estimates.

It is anticipated that the redesign will lead to increased flow of users and generate more page views for the inside pages and the various channels and services, which were not getting much traction earlier.

An industry expert points out that the ad sales team of Rediff.com has already started pitching the website to agencies and advertisers, on the grounds that it has "many homepages" available through the icons on its main homepage.

He adds that the portal has raised the cost of per thousand ad impressions (CPM) of inside pages by 15 to 20 per cent. Earlier, a thousand ad impressions on the inside Web pages were available for Rs 100, while Rediff.com used to charge around Rs 125-175 for a thousand ad impressions on its homepage.

afaqs! spoke to some people from the industry, to find out their points of view on the overall impact of the redesign on Rediff.com's advertising revenue.

Ashok Lalla, president, digital, Euro RSCG

I feel that this ad-free home page avatar is a transitional phase. Ad revenues will certainly drop if the homepage is taken out of the total ad pie of Rediff.com, unless they create a new advertising model that adds greater value at a higher price, but with less clutter.

The revamp may lead to a higher level of consumer engagement with the content and this can turn to greater value to advertisers, who are now accepting that a more engaged consumer is more valuable than several unengaged customers.

Thus, it is an opportunity for Rediff.com to create new engagement metrics for their ad offering, which will not only give a competitive edge and greater revenues to Rediff.com, but also give advertisers better bang for their buck.

With the redesign, Rediff.com may well end up with higher ad rates and fewer advertisers and, therefore, less clutter and more appeal from a customer's point of view. However, if the purpose of this revamp exercise is just restricted to cosmetic changes, then it may be an opportunity lost for Rediff.com.

Sumit Sehgal, vice-president, marketing, Max New York Life

Traditionally, all portals have banked on the homepage for user traffic and, therefore, ad innovations and placements have been mostly on homepages. But Rediff.com's approach to increase the traffic in the inner pages, can only work if the site is able to maintain its loyal user base by offering rich content in the inside pages.

The redesign will also help advertisers to target their audience more precisely. The user would benefit in going exactly to the information that he is looking for. However, users may take time to adapt to this new format.

Alok Kejriwal, chief executive officer and co-founder, Games2win.com

It has been a well-known fact that Rediff was a 'one page' site, which implies that consumers would look at the news headlines or stock quotes on the homepage and then leave the site.

In the earlier scenario, I would always come up to Rediff's homepage, look at the stock prices and then shut the window down. Now, to check the stock prices, I have to visit the Money channel, and with two 300x250 pixels ads placed inside it, I am tempted to click on any one of them.

The ads being removed from the homepage indicates that Rediff.com wants more consumers in the inside pages than outside.

Harmeet Singh Arora, head, media sales, Webaroo Technology

The advertising on the homepage of Rediff.com roughly contributed around 20-25 per cent of revenues to the overall advertising pie, which will now be under the scanner. While the homepages of different sections, such as news and movies, which didn't attract much traffic earlier, may become premium properties for targeting focused user groups. As a result, advertisers may get ready to pay premium pricing for the same.

(Points of View (POV) is a regular column which carries opinions of industry professionals on a current topic of discussion in the advertising, media and marketing industry.)