Naspers owned MIH India’s has launched its “Great Indian Blogger Hunt”, offering bloggers a total of Rs.1.5 crore in prize money. I’d questioned this initiative (and others) earlier, and spoke to Arunava Sinha, Head of Content on the ‘Great Indian Blogger Hunt’, and MIH’s plans:

How does the ‘Great Indian Blogger Hunt’ fit into your plans for ibibo?
Our products are aimed at getting people to share, and we think its important to get people to be paid for the work that they put into creating content. No effort should go uncompensated. Look at the larger picture. There are three players here – the publisher, the consumer and the advertiser. Ibibo provides the consumer with a platform to monetize his content. For us, the consumer is valuable as both a consumer and a creator, and will receive a share of the revenue. The advertiser becomes a seller and can connect with the consumer at the point where the consumer indicates intent. (Ed: the payouts dates for the contest are still ‘to be announced’ )

So are you looking at contextual advertising?
Something like it. Contextual advertising has a content context. We’re looking at creating intent context.

You seem to be saying that this isn’t a one-off thing…
No, it’s not a one-off thing. This is not a promotional activity. We’re providing an opportunity for thousands of people to make money with their content. There are two key elements – the quantum of content, which is in the users control, and the popularity of the content, which is not.

How will you be marketing this?
So far the news has spread by word of mouth. We should be rolling out a marketing plan shortly, but that will be mostly online marketing. What people need to realize is that it will be important for every user to do his own marketing.

One of the things that I noticed is that there is a lack of customization. There’s an ibibo banner on top, and I can’t really call it “my space”...
Blogging in India is an evolved phenomenon, and many those who have taken it up and want to customize their blog template are serious about blogging. Blogging is specialized. They’re a very small percentage of those online. But there are also those who haven’t taken it up, or are not as serious about it yet. We plan to take it to another level – spontaneous self expression. About customization- we will evolve with our users. The idea is to give them an easy to use platform to begin with.

What about the rest of the content? How do Bixee, Pixrat, Motafish and Chotafish fit into the scheme of things?
There are plans for Bixee but I can’t talk about those yet. Motafish and Chotafish will be rebranded as ibibo Games and ibibo Kids. We launched them as Motafish and Chotafish to test them.

The games at Motafish and Chotafish seems to be primarily international games. Any plans for local content?
We have plans for games, for localized content, but not like what has currently been done. Something strategically similar to what we’re doing with other content that we have, but I can’t talk about it yet.

Are you monitoring any of your content? What about Pixrat’s not-safe-for-work content?
We’re watching it. We allow content to be flagged as inappropriate, and monitoring it for anti-national content. Pixrat will be cleaned up.

Any acquisitions or new product launches in the works?
We’re launching a localized Q&A product. We also have plans for local language blogging, and SMS blogging. There’s also a big ticket acquisition taking place very soon.

*

Apparently, MIH is trying to create a self contained ecosystem of content: they will provide multiple services to users, and at the same time keep users within the fold by sharing some of the advertising revenue with them. I wonder if they intend to let people to create their own games, or their own levels for games? Traction has picked up since I last checked, and with marketing activities, it will increase. The Indian net user is still more of a consumer than a contributor; money might just make a contributor of him. At the same time, one has to be wary of the fact that consumers evolve; once they get used to the platform and find that there are better products online, they’ll switch.