This Native Ad Network Uses Creative Tech To Help Content Go Viral

Businesses in the digital age need to reach their targeted audience as fast as possible, but most advertising formats – digital or otherwise – don’t always scale that way and enterprises often miss out on fast and widespread reach-out. The key challenge on a thickly populated Internet is to get discovered in a relevant manner – so that the impact stays long enough to make its point. But to achieve that, one must think beyond banners and display ads and one start-up can help you do things differently. Meet e-generator.com, a native advertising network that focuses on brand promotion based on relevant content (the company calls it content-based advertising) and leverages a growing network of content publishers in India to ensure instant discovery and distribution of such content on the World Wide Web.

However, there is one marked difference between e-generator and other native advertising firms. The Gurgaon-headquartered company is essentially catering to the media/content industry and helping online publishers get the eyeballs. Traffic is driven through a unique audience exchange programme where content from member websites is shared across e-generator’s network of publishers to increase overall visibility.

What’s more, this network grows by default as every client of the firm becomes a publishing partner as well. The company creates ‘teaser’ for every story and adds images to whet readers’ curiosity, and then places content widgets on all publishers’ sites – so that media firms/marketers can promote their content through native ads on the Web. There is also an intelligent software tool to track the performance of each story.

Globally, companies like Outbrain and Disqus have already introduced a similar native ad concept, but e-generator has brought it to India for the first time. Here is a snapshot that captures the start-up’s vision and viability.

Who runs e-generator.com: Shaan Bahra, a major in Mathematics and an MCA degree-holder. He also trained as a design and multimedia professional and has more than 14 years of industry exposure. Prior to starting this initiative in India, Shaan worked with Rediffusion DY&R, as well as several other firms operating in media, graphics, animation and the Internet space. The current initiative took off in December 2012.

What inspired the venture: The fast-growing online market in India calls for the latest techniques in digital advertising – so that online businesses get better positioning and ROI. “That was the chief motivation for bringing native advertising to the Indian digital space,” recalls Shaan. “Next, we had to decide on the industry and we zeroed in on publishers as Indian readers are exploring digital content as never before. This is especially important as content consumption via mobile Internet is trending right now,” he adds.

The Indian venture, however, is similar to the start-ups promoted by Berlin-based Rocket Internet GmbH, a venture arm of the Samwer brothers and known for cloning several successful online business models of the US in other markets. “But in our case, it is Moscow-based SMI2.net who has a similar venture up and running in Russia for more than 7 years,” says Shaan. Inspired by the concept and the huge opportunity the Indian market offers, he, along with the parent company, started the Indian initiative last year.

What’s the pitch: First ever native advertising network in India and the first ever audience exchange network, helping content publishers and brands to grow their audience base.

How it works: According to Shaan, e-generator curates the content gathered from digital providers and serves it on a platter for end-users to ensure a growing base of unique and relevant visitors (those who are keen to read such content). The purpose is not to promote brands who publish news, but to promote the good content and stories published by them. While content consumers on the Web get to explore a variety of topics, there is a lot of backend work going on. “For example, we are constantly expanding our network of publishers and helping them grow in terms of visitors and insight,” says Shaan. “We also share our ad revenues (earned from paid content) with our partner sites.”

Claim to fame: A decent bouquet of publishers to show off. The company claims that within a span of 10 months, it has managed to cover around 80% of the digital publishers in India and still counting. Key advertisers including GroupM, Mindshare and DbbMudra have worked with e-generator, and appreciated the quality of traffic and the way it runs the advertising engine.

Show me the money: Unlike many others, this start-up has raised around Rs 1 crore in seed funding. Currently, revenue earning is through PPC (pay per click) as the firm delivers committed number of page views to each of its media/content clients. The other aspect is to have the advertisers explore the potential of effective marketing – via content and on news publishers’ platform. “We have already started that with GroupM and Mindshare, and hope to build on that,” says Shaan. The company has not reached break-even yet but hopes to do so by July 2014, going by the market trend.

The digital advertising market in India was pegged at $410 million in 2012 and is expected to reach $1.6 billion by 2015, details Shaan. According to him, the major chunk of money lies with the advertisers who want to focus more on promoting brands through content. That’s because when people read about brands (the whole story instead of one-off product ads), they love them and become the custodians of those brands. So a lot of marketers have now realised that digital is the place where connect with the target group is most essential. One can connect via videos, content, images… and people love and share these over social networks – one of the best ways to go viral. But in the first place, that content must be featured on authentic and validated platforms – for instance, digital publishers of repute.

“We are doing just that. When content search happens, we tend to be there at quality and relevant landing pages (of digital publishers). So we expect to work with a large number of marketers very soon,” he adds.

Biggest challenge: Positioning the business is going to be the biggest challenge as all publishers are not ready for native advertising or audience exchange. They have to realise that people grow only when they synergise. And the same goes for the advertising space. The stakeholders have to accept the originality of the concept, explore untried methods and look at ROI-driven advertising from a different perspective.

Global expansion is the other crucial area. The company could be expanding to the Americas, the European and the nascent South African markets in another year or two. The first two markets are quite mature by now but e-generator intends to show them the immense opportunity of content marketing in India that has a huge and fast-growing user base. “That won’t be an easy task, but we still intend to do it to ensure global growth,” concludes Shaan.