BigRock and .biz launch program to bring more Indian businesses online

BigRock, one of India’s leading domain registrars and web hosting companies, today announced that is has joined hands with Neustar to promote .biz as the preferred domain for small businesses in India.

Neustar Inc., a provider of real-time information and analysis to the Internet, telecommunications, technology, retail, media and advertising industries, also manages the domain name registry for .biz. Since the launch of .biz in 2001, Neustar has been working to establish .biz as a one-stop solution to help businesses expand their online presence with trust, recognition and optimum levels of business uptime.

As part of this initiative, BigRock and Neustar have outlined an aggressive outreach campaign that includes a series of new television commercials (TVCs), extensive digital outreach, and a complete online presence for businesses that includes a .biz domain, web hosting, hosted email for their .biz domain and Google Adwords coupons worth Rs. 2500, all of which are integrated with an easy-to-use interactive website builder priced at Rs. 199.

Elaborating on the campaign, Bhavin Turakhia, Founder of BigRock said, “Since we launched BigRock a few years ago, we have worked hard to bring home the message of why being online matters to Indian businesses through our unique messaging. For this .biz program we have just launched, we wanted to appeal to a small business owner’s intrinsic pride of ownership in her/his business – which is something we believe connects every single business owner out there, whether big or small. As a business owner myself, I am proud to associate myself with .biz and feel that our tagline for this campaign – ‘.biz – when you are proud of your business’ – adequately captures this emotion. Today, when only one in 20 small businesses in India has an online presence, we feel this message is important to get out there.”

Commenting on the partnership with BigRock, Alex Berry, senior vice president and general manager of Enterprise Services at Neustar said, “The penetration of the Internet and growth of the digital economy in India is very exciting.  Already, India has the third-largest Internet user base globally, presenting exciting opportunities for businesses that were once unheard of. Also, given the various touch points to access the Internet today, it is an opportune time for us to reach out to emerging Indian businesses, highlighting the potential and value that .biz and our solutions can offer. We have a thriving base of over 2.3 million .biz domain owners globally who clearly identify .biz as a natural domain extension for businesses. With the coming of new TLDs later this year, we believe it’s even more important to drive home this differentiation. Our partnership with BigRock shows our commitment to bring a high quality domain extension with global appeal to Indian business owners.”

“By industry estimates, we are activating upwards of 50,000-70,000 smartphone users every day in India and these constitute the vast majority of the new Internet users coming online. Rapidly accelerating trends in mobile data usage amongst our population means that in 24 months’ time the Indian Internet scenario will be even more exciting than it is today. We look at growth in other mobile led geographies such as China where the increase in domains and web presence by businesses has been unprecedented in the last few years and draw inspiration from this trend. We believe a similar trend will manifest in India in the next few years. We look to both educate and build strong value propositions with our .biz program for our customers across India. The .biz website package we offer contains everything a business owner needs to build a basic informational website or a more complex e-commerce enabled portal” said Shashank Mehrotra, GM & Business Head at BigRock.

He added, “The Neustar team has been a fantastic partner for us and its commitment to this market and in helping us build this program has been truly outstanding. We look forward to working with them to make this program a resounding success.”