Gadget Portal 91mobiles acquires Pricebaba.com

91mobiles.com, India’s largest smartphone discovery platform, today announced that it has acquired a majority stake in Pricebaba.com, a 500 Startups-funded company. With this, 91Digital Web Pvt Ltd, the parent company of 91mobiles, now operates three websites in the gadgets vertical – 91mobiles.com, KillerFeatures.com, and Pricebaba.com, with a combined reach of 30 mn visits per month. Currently, 91mobiles.com works with most of the leading electronics & telecom brands like Samsung, Nokia, Oppo, Vivo etc as well as leading e-tailers such as Amazon, Flipkart, PayTM, TataCliq etc.

Pricebaba.com, which currently serves 5 Million users per month, will continue to run as a separate property focused on helping electronics buyers make their purchase decisions. While 91mobiles will remain focused on smartphone enthusiasts and buyers, Pricebaba shall cater to people looking to buy any electronics product, including TVs, washing machines, ACs, and refrigerators, in addition to smartphones.

As a result of this acquisition, 91mobiles & Pricebaba will jointly create the largest audience network of in-market smartphone and gadget buyers in India, outside of the large eCommerce sites. 91mobiles plans to provide gadget brands better insights into the consumer buying process, as well as sharper ad-targeting capabilities.

To this end, 91mobiles is investing in building a programmatic ad platform, that helps target advertiser campaigns to the not just in-market buyers, but also the right micro-segment of in-market buyers. This will enable gadget brands to substantially improve the efficiency of their programmatic ad-campaigns. For instance, an ad for an Rs. 15,000 phone, can be targeted specifically to people looking to buy a phone in the Rs. 10,000 - 20,000 range.

91mobiles intends to scale Pricebaba.com as a site that caters to the growing regional language audience that may be new to digital. Towards this, 91mobiles will also invest $500k in upgrading the Pricebaba platform to deliver content in over 10 local languages, including text, video, as well as bandwidth-friendly audio content, making it easy for first-time online buyers to make their purchase decision.

Pricebaba investors, including California-based 500 Startups, will exit the venture as a part of this deal. Annkur P Agarwal, Co-founder of Pricebaba, will move to an advisory role.

Nitin Mathur, Co-founder of 91mobiles.com commented on the acquisition, “Over the years, 91mobiles.com has emerged as the go-to platform for consumers who are looking to buy a smartphone. While smartphones remain the largest electronics category online, we are now seeing sharp growth in the number of people researching online before purchasing appliances and electronics other than smartphones as well. With Pricebaba, we will also tap this userbase, and grow our reach to in-market gadget buyers. The programmatic ad platform we are setting up across our network of sites will help improve ad performance by 50-60%, across all relevant metrics, for advertisers who chose to avail of our micro-segment targeting capabilities.

“The Pricebaba team and I are extremely excited to be a part of 91mobiles. Over the years, 91mobiles founders have built a fantastic business model and share the same partnership mindset as Pricebaba. Under the leadership of 91mobiles, Pricebaba will cater to the growing number of consumers who are now researching online for buying electronic appliances. Additionally, with this partnership, our focus will also be on developing solutions and packages for our advertisers so that together we can grow as a larger network in the ecosystem,” said Annkur P Agarwal, Co-Founder of Pricebaba.