One of the biggest multi-language portals offering content in four south Indian languages viz. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil and Telugu failed to break even for the sixth consecutive year in 2006. Its operational costs for the entire year stood at Rs 7.2 crore, while the advertising revenue for the same period hobbled up to Rs 1.2 crore. The yawning lax was filled in, and the company survived, thanks to robust earnings from its English portal.

Promise in numbers
Against this very backdrop, early this month, Yahoo India launched five Indian language channels on its portal, aspiring, ostensibly, to tap into the ‘burgeoning middle-class populace’. Yahoo’s move was close on the heels of a similar manoeuvre by MSN: The portal from the Microsoft stable had launched its vernacular channels in the December of 2006.

The statistics of the regional game is compelling. India’s Internet user base currently stands at 35 million (that’s roughly 3.2 percent of the population), mostly English-speaking inhabitants of metropolitan cities. As India’s information highway makes inroads into her indolent interiors, the Internet user base will shoot up.

“We are looking at 250-300 million users coming online in the next few years. Beyond the 120 million mark, we will have non-English speaking users who would necessarily need content in their own language,” says Krishna Prasad, Managing Director, MSN India.

“Besides,” notes George Zacharias, Managing Director, Yahoo India, “as tier-II cities hop on to the World Wide Web, we will have a rising segment of users who, though well-versed in English, are more comfortable interacting in their mother tongue.” Keeping these factors in mind, Yahoo and MSN are going to market with the underlying belief that if Internet has to penetrate in India, languages will play a dominating role.