New Delhi: Yahoo India, the global internet giant’s arm in the country, said it expects to grow its ad revenues in India by at least 40% this year as many advertisers shift their budgets to the online media space.
The online ad industry in the country is expected to grow by 25-30% in 2009 and Yahoo sees a growth of 40-50% in the online display advertising space. The total advertising market in India is pegged at $4 billion by the end of the year, with the online ad space being worth $100 million currently.
The company added that advertisers in the months of November to January were charting out their strategy plan which led to a virtual freeze on ad spending. But business has picked up recently.
Pearl Uppal, sales director at Yahoo! India, told DNA Money, “The specified classifieds spaces such as jobs and matrimony advertising, and retail and real estate have definitely slowed down due to global slowdown but when you look at sectors such as FMCGs, telecom, auto, media and entertainment, they are growing and that has more than compensated for the loss in other sectors.”
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Yahoo, however, did not provide its sales figures for India. Uppal added that companies are redeploying ad funds from television and print to the online medium. Currently, the online ads segment constitutes about 2.5% of the total ad industry in India. This share is expected to grow to 7% in the next three years.
Yahoo has a market leadership in the online display advertising space, with online search engine major Google enjoying the premium position in search-based advertising in the country. Google, however, does not have a significant presence in the display advertising space.
Uppal said Yahoo hasn’t faced any pressures to cut down the tariffs for ad rates. In print and television advertising, ad rates have plunged up to 50% over the last year. “Ad rates have neither gone up nor gone down for us. We have competitively priced our offerings against TV and print. However, we can’t raise prices for the next 8-10 months,” Uppal said.
Some of the companies that advertise on Yahoo networks are Nokia, Airtel, Reliance Infocomm, Hewlett Packard, Dell, IBM, Microsoft and Makemytrip, among others.
Yahoo India has sales networks in 12 cities, including Gurgaon, Mumbai and Bangalore.”We are monitoring our growth in the 12 cities and we have a lot of work to do in cities outside our core four. I don’t think we will be adding more cities this year,” Uppal said.
March 26, 2009
source: dnaindia.com