Komli to represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide

Komli and eBay India have entered into an exclusive partnership whereby Komli will represent eBay India for all their ad sales worldwide. In addition, Komli’s ad network optimization technology PubMatic will optimize eBay’s unsold ad space for maximization of revenue.

This is very exciting news for a couple of reasons:
1. A global internet giant has chosen to partner with an Indian startup for its superior understanding of online advertising and online advertising technology,
2. This bodes well for the growth of online advertising in India — large portals, which in the past have not looked at online advertising as a key revenue driver, are starting to do that now.

For details see official news release at – http://www.komli.com/news/ebaypress.php.

I wish I had read this earlier

Crossing the Chasm. Lesson for a startup:

Neat ad

Pretty creative! I could do with one of these.

Pubmatic debuts at TechCrunch40

This is absolutely grand — Pubmatic, a Komli product, was showcased today at TechCrunch40, the most eagerly awaited technology conference of the year. More than 800 startups from across the world entered the competition in the inaugural year, of which 40 were chosen for the main event held yesterday and today in the Bay area.

More coverage is available here.

My colleague Mukul, who leads Komli’s engineering team in Pune, has a post about the launch of Pubmatic here.

Komli’s Mumbai Mixer

Komli organized a mixer for the internet industry on May 8. The idea was to connect people in the online industry to exchange ideas and network. Ouch, do I sound like a drone?

We had a pretty solid turnout. At its peak, there must have been about 60 people in the room. Going forward, we hope to do a mixer every month.

Check out some pictures here.

Komli Announces VC Funding

Some links to the story:

Mint (a WSJ newspaper): http://www.livemint.com/2007/04/18005730/Online-ad-company-Komli-Inc-re.html

AlooTechie: http://www.alootechie.com/News/2291.asp

ContentSutra: http://www.contentsutra.com/entry/419-ad-network-komli-raises-funding-from-draper-fischer-jurvetson-helion-ve/

Komli: http://www.komli.com/news/

Komli’s new product launches (in Beta)

We launched the private beta of our new product today at 12:43 pm. It’s a great feeling. I can’t disclose much right now since the product is still under wraps. We’ve invited a select number of users to test-drive it.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I’m so excited !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Agencies, please get your act together

What talent crunch? Despite all teh hype, there’s no talent crunch in the Indian online industry.

I get such sloppily put together documents and presentations from people at top online media buying agencies that it makes me too ashamed to even sign my name to them. In general, no one pays attention to grammer & punctuation. I get documents which look as if people were sending text sms’ to their friends.

Folks, please get your act together! It’s shameful to send out such work  and it’s a huge waste of my time, not to mention a turn-off, to see/read such documents.

How do you measure your internet traffic?

Fons Tuinstra, one of my favourite China-based bloggers, has a good post on problems with traffic measurement packages. He uses AWStats and Google Analytics and both give him pretty different results.

This issue is an important one because in the online advertising industry, the traffic on a site often determines its heft. All things being equal, an advertiser will always prefer to advertise on a site with more traffic than less.

But Fons’ post raises the important issue of how do you actually know your true traffic figure. I’m curious to know what has been the experience of other users while using different traffic measurement packages. Write in.

Growth of online advertising in India

Anurag Gupta’s blog has an informative post on the state of online advertising in India. I’m surprised that search accounts for only 24% of online advertising spend in the Indian context. Given Indian advertisers focus on performance advertising, I would have thought that search would have taken a larger share.

While advertising in the online medium is still a much younger cousin of print, TV and radio, the growth figures are astonishing. According to industry sources, these are YoY growth rates of advertising spend:

TV: 12%

Print: 5%

Outdoor: 3%

Radio: 15%

Online: 100%

That’s right, online spend is growing at 100% YoY. Incredible. In absolute amounts, it is still just a tiny fraction of spend on TV, but at these rates, spend on online advertising should equal spend on TV advertising in ? years.