We'll be making acquisitions in tech, health, auto fields: Sandeep Amar

With two decades of experience mostly in the digital space, Sandeep Amar, CEO, India.com Web Portal Ltd (IWPL), has been an entrepreneur, speaker and a leading blogger in the Indian digital ecosystem.

Amar is passionate about mobile, Internet and enterprise-wide applications and has successfully taken ideas and strategies to market that resulted in millions of users and millions of dollars in revenue.

In conversation with Adgully, Amar speaks about the key focus areas of IWPL, the stress on language content, acquisition plans and more. Excerpts:

Adgully (AG): How has India.com Web Portal Ltd’s journey been so far?
Sandeep Amar (SA): I think it has been a phenomenal journey, especially in last two and a half years. We have moved from No. 6 to No. 2 position in terms of Indian publishers. We have increased traffic by 300 per cent and revenues by over 400 per cent.

AG: What sets IWPL apart from its competitors? What are the key differentiators?
SA: The key differentiator has been our focus on the young Indian users. Rather than following a pattern or copying international sites, we have kept our focus on our target audience, which is young Indian users across the globe. We have not tried to be a news platform, but be a friend who shares trending stories with users. The second differentiator is that we have not tried to push everything on one platform, we have specific verticals for specific needs – be it entertainment (bollywoodlife.com), technology (bgr.in), health (thehealthsite.com), and cricket (cricketcountry.com) – with the focus being on trending stories. The next thing we did was to bring in specific verticals like itripto.com, which is focussed on helping users plan their trips by giving quality information on destinations and other guidance around the same. We have a dedicated portal on the all the hot gossip off the field in cricket – criclife.com, which has done very well.

AG: How do you keep content relevant for your TG?
SA: Content is the heart of our business and our top focus area. We believe in maximising the original content with speed, SEO and tonality (for social). Starting with a news cycle point of view, we want to be the fastest and move into tonality and opinion pieces as soon as possible. It is a big fight with several quality portals chasing the same.

AG: How important is vernacular content for you?
SA: We have been highly focussed on vernacular content, with Hindi, Bengali and Marathi as our core focus. We have some Tamil content as well, but our focus as of now has been Hindi, Bengali and Marathi content. It gets us loads of traffic and we have noticed that vernacular audience engage five times more than English audiences.

AG: What can we expect from IWPL in 2016?
SA: We are in the process of raising capital and will be making acquisitions in the tech, health, auto and related fields.

AG: How has the response been to your apps?
SA: We have apps for all our verticals, but have only succeeded with cricket. We have been focusing on growing the traffic on our web and mobile browsers and not so much on apps.

AG: What does the road ahead look like?
SA: Digital is a fast-paced industry and content business is growing fast. We are moving fast with the changes in the industry and have as our role models the new age publishing companies rather than conventional media companies. We are moving ahead along the lines of firms like Mashable, Vox, Buzzfeed, Gawker and others.