MSN India launches regional portals

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MSN India on Thursday announced the launch of its regional portals as well as MSN Messenger in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam languages.

It also unveiled the new MSN India Homepage and Windows Live domains. This new introduction would enable MSN users to chat in their regional language.

"Our focus is on our four verticals in cricket, entertainment, lifestyle and news. We would be sourcing editorial content and information from various regional language papers and other sources to provide information in different languages in these areas," said Mr Jaspreet Bindra, Country Head, MSN India and Windows Live.

The Windows Live Messenger platform would be the same as before, with the additional facility to use Hindi and other regional languages. For this, there were multiple keyboard options available with the language packages at: http://www.bhashaindia.com with Windows Live Spaces, which allowed Weblogging, sharing pictures and music.

AD Revenue

With this launch, the company is expecting to rope in a sizeable chunk of revenue from advertisers in the regional media.

"The advertising revenue of press in English language is 51 per cent, Hindi 23 per cent, Gujarati 10 per cent, Tamil-Malayam 10 per cent and Bengali-Kannada about 4 per cent. We would like to focus on regional advertising. At present we reach about 68 per cent of online users. With our regional portals, we expect our reach to increase by another 10 per cent," said Mr Rajnish, Head of Digital Marketing Revenue and Strategic Business, Windows Live .

Taken from Business Line

thehindubusinessline.in