[India] Net may make ads dearer for newspapers

["Irfan Khan" <KhanIA@super.net.pk>]

Net may make ads dearer for newspapers  

Our Bangalore Bureau 
29 JULY  

THE growth in the use of the Internet in India will lead to a significant 
decline in the advertisement revenues of all newspapers over the next few 
years. In 1998-99 itself there was a decline in appointment ads for all 
papers, said Mr Sunil Rajshekhar, vice-president, Times Interactive, The 
Times of India group. He was speaking at the conference organised by the 
Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) at Bangalore on Net-Transac '99: 
Transforming Business through Emerging Technologies. The appointment and 
classified ads on the Internet cost just Rs 20 as against roughly Rs 1,000 
in print form. Once the papers lose considerably on the ad revenue they 
would be forced to increase the paper prices in future. The Times group has 
been able to capture around 40 per cent of the Internet ad spend in India, 
he said. Organisations cannot ignore e-commerce and in the next few years 
it will permeate every facet of an organisation. All companies wanting to 
make effective use of e-commerce need to remember that it is the customers 
who make the rules and not what the company thinks about its 
products/services, said Mr Anand Sudarshan, president, Planetasia.com. The 
consumer will have all the information he needs before effecting a purchase 
and the smart salesman will not be able to fool him any more. A common 
query on e-commerce is, "How safe is it to do business on the Internet?" It 
suffices to say that Amazon.com has over 3 million fraud free transactions, 
said Ms Uma Iyer, director- strategic alliance, Rediff on the Net. In 
developed nations it has been observed that the largest users of the 
Internet are those between the age group of 18 and 35. Estimates for India 
indicate similar trends. So, e-commerce can be targeted at this age-group 
first. There is a lot of hype about e-commerce in India, but it should be 
noted that the Internet user density in India is only one in a lakh as 
against two per lakh in Pakistan, said Mr P K X Thomas, director 
(technical), Investment Research and Information Services Ltd. Out of 160 
countries, India is ranked after 130 in terms of Internet density. The 
benefits of the Internet-enabled services is currently concentrated in a 
few pockets and most regions in Karnataka do not have access to these 
services, said Mr N Viswanathan, principal secretary, commerce & 
industries, government of Karnataka. The social, legal and political 
aspects of the Internet revolution should be taken into consideration, he 
added.  

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