The Hindu Business Line : `No clear differentiator in AOL's content offering'

"AOL is a dominant Internet player in US and its entry into India can only spur competition in the domestic Internet market and help it grow in the process. Also, by virtue of being the world's third largest online ad network, AOL may very well accelerate the online advertising business in India as well," he explains to Business Line.

Last week also saw Yahoo launching a city portal for India.

"With the entry of AOL in India, the country has now six major horizontal portals, the other five being Rediff, Yahoo, Indiatimes, MSN and Sify," says Mr Barnwal.

"However, I wonder if more than three portals would be able to prosper in the long run. And so, it would be interesting to see how the horizontal portal business gets consolidated in the country."

AOL has launched email and messenger amongst other services in India, but there is hardly anything exciting or new in these services, he feels.

"There is also no clear differentiator in AOL's content offering for the Indian market except a promise to offer the best of India and America."

Does it mean best of Bollywood and Hollywood, wonders Mr Barnwal.

He also doubts if existing email users of Yahoo, Google, Rediff or Indiatimes would shift their loyalty to AOL unless they are very particular about having a short email ID.

"The AOL email ID has an inherent advantage in this regard as it has shortest five letter suffix aol.in as against gmail.com, yahoo.com, indiatimes.com or rediffmail.com."

Since the Internet market in the US and Europe has almost touched its zenith, companies such as Yahoo, AOL and Google look for the next stage of growth in emerging markets like India. So, it is no surprise that the country has attracted considerable interest from these companies, according to Mr Barnwal.

"Also the fact that India's Internet population, according to comScore, has grown by 33 per cent, against 10 per cent growth in the world's overall online audience size, has played no less a role in making the country a promising online market."

According to comScore, India has become the eighth biggest country in terms of the total online population."

AOL's impact may be felt in the quality of our Web sites, feels Mr Barnwal. "According to JuxtConsult, only 20 per cent of most popular Web sites in India are user-friendly and only 16 per cent are customer responsive," he cites. "Let's hope that AOL's entry into India and the growing interest of other major international online players like Yahoo in the Indian market help mature the Internet market here and Web sites in this country become more and more competitive and responsive to their users, like their counterparts are in the US and Europe."