Mid to late 90s belong to dotcom era. Keeping with the worldwide trend then, we’ve seen many Indian portal sites – and vortals or vertical portals – coming into being. A few shopping sites too debuted. Post dotcom bust, few remain, and those who remain are not better off either.
This is because the search giants like Yahoo! and Google expanded their territory well into Indian dotcom arena, rendering pure Indian search portals almost redundant. Also, Indian net popularity progressed sluggishly, which meant that big Indian websites barring a few (like Rediff, Sify, etc.) could not demand enough eyeballs.
Things now are much better if the spate of new Indian websites is any indication. These mainly cater to niche categories, aping their famous American counterparts. For example, if Digg, del.icio.us, Furl and others are global biggies in social networking, the Indian sites following suit are Minglebox, Yaari and Fropper. The same goes for Indian video-sharing sites like Apnatube and Meravideo that are smaller cousins of YouTube (acquired by Google), Flickr (Yahoo!’s property) and similar others.
One can’t help but note that most of these new sites are rather target-specific, aiming mainly the Indian diaspora and of course the burgeoning net-savvy youngsters in the country. It seems the earning module for them is roughly the same, which is by selling space for ads, similar to what this blog does.
Be that as it may, here are some Indian websites that are presently making news:
- Video Sharing
- Classifieds (similar to Craigslist)
- Social Networking
- Local Search
- Others
Related reading:
Hello,
Just wanted to inform you about a site I developed out of passion for Local languages.
http://www.bhomiyo.com
It offers search through Google, Yahoo, MSN results with online keyboard to type in Indian languages.
Apart from that
1) Goli Maro Search – search ignoring the spelling mistakes in indian languages
2) Transliteration – xliteration from one indian language to another and English. Click on X-Literate at the bottom of the home page.
YOur feedback will be appreciated – info@bhomiyo.com
Oneindia.in has been renamed as Click.in
Oneindia.in is a India specific portal and Click.in a classifieds portal
— B.G. Mahesh
CEO
Oneindia.in
bhomiyo:
Your site, bhomiyo is awesome. I like it very much, though I’m yet to try all the features.
bg:
Thanks for updating about oneindia.
Rohit Varma, CEO of Yo4Ya Digital Pvt Ltd, mentions about his ‘relationship’ site, Yo4Ya.
Yo4Ya is a great site. Though membership is by invitation only, it really is impressive. I prefer calling Yo4Ya a ‘relationship portal’ or if you prefer, a ‘hangout portal’.
Thanks Rohit for letting us know.
Fropper.com has just added Authenticated Groups & ezBlogs. Check them out!
Hi,
Here’s a new entrant in the viral video markets. KONKAN TV. I started the site with the exact same codebase as meravideo.com or apnatube.com or any of those other viral video sites, But have evolved over time (which is a mere 60 days, and believe me it’s a one man show so far…) and have gotten the site to a point to where it is today.
I personally do not believe in paid blogging, as it can be extremely biased and in my humble opinion goes against the very essemse of blogging.
So having said that, could i request you to please review KONKAN TV and provide me some constructive critique on it, so I can better the service. Please note; I am not asking praises, but the opposite. Please do critique it, because the critique would help me immensely, and I can work on making the service better.
Do read my blog post on “who are we” and “SOCIAL INCOME“.