TekChakra.com

I still don’t understand CEOs and owners of companies who report inflated traffic and revenue figures to the media. It just isn’t good business and it will bounce back someday on their face.

Case # 1 - Khichdee.com 

A recent article on Business2.0 reported Khichdee.com getting 4500 new classifieds posts per day. Khichdee is claiming to be the Indian version of Craigslist.

Dream on.

They are no where near in site simlistic design, genuine posts and visitor traffic. Infact there are many other Indian portals with free classifieds sections and other desi classfiieds websites that are way better in design, authenticity of data and traffic numbers. Khichdee is just trying to cash in dismally low Google Adsense revenues in a publicity stunt (the site has jarring in-your-face Adsense image ads all over) - note: Craigslist shows no ads, and has a much simpler and uncluttered interface.

Case # 2 - Bharatstudent.com

In another report, another social networking site - BharatStudent.com has claimed that they “got” 1.4 million registered users within 4 months of its launch and 40 million pages views a month. Sheesh… thats completely the height of misrepresentation. The parent company is Northgate Technologies / Axill Europe Ltd. They’ve even cited some Alexa ranking figures. What they say about their ranking in Alexa is true - but there’s absolutely no way they’re doing 40 million page views per month or have already got 1.4 million registered students. I’d like to openly challenge them here. To see the truth - go see their traffic rankings and number of people compared to Shaadi.com - and you’ll see the truth. This is yet another example of media hype being created by false information.

Did they pull this to justify their funding of Rs 25 crores? I dont know what stats these guys are using. 1.4 million is 14 Lakhs. Thats probably what Shaadi.com and Bharatmatrimony.com took 5 years to reach. Its completely whacked out. They could NOT have done this in 4 months - no matter how much they spent on marketing. I don’t believe the ecosystem supports this kind of growth with already existing hugely popular Orkut and others like Fropper. I’m figuring Axill.com is an ad network - so could they have somehow miscalculated the statistics?

Case # 3 - TheBig.TV

And, just coming in is a report from TheBig.TV that they pegged over 400,000 visits in one single day for some video of theirs on the Abhishek-Aishwarya wedding. Nice try. A simple visit to the website will show you that most of the videos have a dismal number of views… so I dont know where these figures are coming in from. They claimed to have pulled a stunt by hiring Shahruk and other bollywood look alikes and asking them to attempt to gatecrash the Abhi-Aish wedding. This supposedly cost them Rs 80,000 to do - and they shot the stunt on video and then circulated the video online - and it grew virally attracting 350,000 visitors the first day and 400,000 the second day. This is again another media stunt. TheBig.TV traffic rankings are very low - not exceeding probably around 500 to 1000 page views per day - forget about 400,000.

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized