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Instablogs Negotiating $3 Million Round Of Funding: Report

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Instablogs, an India-based citizen journalism site is negotiating a $3 million round of funding, reports TechCrunch. As per the story, the company gets 2.5+ million page-views per month, has 12,000 registered users, and did $300,000 in revenue last year. So what do they need the funds for? To hire key management staff, buying servers and bandwidth, alliances with news agencies and more. I just checked, and the site has undergone a major revamp - it was once a blog network, but now the information is categorized according to country, content discovery is easier; there’s also a Firefox extension for Instablogs, and also extensive use of AJAX. But AJAX not a community maketh: users can rate content, and there’s a separate page highlighting comments from the community. The community appears to be fairly active - check out the frequency of comments. I’m a little wary of pre-funding announcements, it almost appears as if the company is making an announcement that they’re looking for funding. More at TechCrunch

Instablogs reminds me of NowPublic.com, and a great talk given by Leonard Brody at FICCI Frames. More on that when I have the bandwidth for the audio.

Nikhil Pahwa Mar 28, 2008 12:12 AM ET
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Posted In: Money, M&A & Venture Capital, Venture Capital

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  • what the nice post…..great…. thanks for the interesting and informative information you shared with us….about the Instablogs Negotiating $3 Million Round Of Funding: Report

  • Jiren Chhapia

    Hi RAM,

    If you are interested to invest in Indian IT company for Mobile Contents Development, Kindly contact me jirenchhapia@gmail.com. We are first to going to launch Mobile Contents with zero cost.

    Our Business Project was selected in TIE-ISB Connect 2007 to present project before VC.

    Thanks.

    Jiren Chhapia

  • Techcrunch got hold of an old presentations. Even the numbers they have quoted are not correct.

    We used to have 2.5 million pageviews and 12,000 reg. members few months ago. Now the numbers have increased quiet a bit.

    @ Aayush
    Mainstream media can’t compete with new media by only deploying handful of blogs, setting up comments with their articles or adding few social networking features. We are not trying to competed with MSM, but building a platform where traditional media and new media don`t compete but complement each other.

    So its not "alternate journalism" but "collaborative journalism"

  • mayank

    Hey Ram,

    Broadband shouldn't be an issue. That said, don't expect 8 mbps lines running arnd. As long as you're moving to a metro you should be fine.

    There is easy availability of wired broadband, and its pretty easy to get a connection. Plans range from 1mbps/month | unlimited access for about $70 to a $25 512kbps unlimited plan.

    Don't expect anything mroe than dial up speeds from our GPRS/EDGE networks though. And Srabucks-ish free wifi coffe houses are very very rare, unless u r in b'lore, where they are singularly rare.

    Lemme know if u need any more info. Check out Reliance/Airtel/MTNL/TATA for plans. You need to get a tele line for these, but u don't necessarily have to use it.

    cheerios.

  • Citizen journalism is what CNN-IBN is also promoting pretty aggressively these days….and has got quite a lot of success too. But I guess InstaBlog is positioned more towards alternate journalism which is something that conventional news agencies can't

    BTW
    >the company gets 2.5+ page-views per month

    Did you mean 2.5+ million? :-)

  • Ram

    Nikhil,

    I am a regular reader of this site. I am planning to move from US to India, to begin a new venture.  I notice that you frequently highlight the issues related to broadband access. It bothers me that I might not even be able to get a decent broadband connection in India. Can you clarify the available plans and prices related to internet access in India. That would be an invaluable post, and a timely one for me. Can you accommodate it..;-)

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