Web18 Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd, the Internet arm of Network18 Media and Investments Ltd is set to launch a horizontal portal, said two people familiar with the development (according to Livemint).

A horizontal portal refers to an Internet portal site that offers a broad range of content and services. Exampels could be Rediff, Yahoo!, MSN, AOL etc. 

 Web18 had launched Josh18 sometime back – that portal comes close to being a horizontal player but it lacks things like travel booking and email; 2 essentials I would say when it comes to classifying a portal as horizontal.

 Web18 has 15 stand alone sites in various field of interest such as cricket, finance, shopping, travel, news, jobs, technology etc. and thus it makes perfect sense to integrate all these sites into one complete portal. Incidentally, Web 18’s top portal MoneyControl has seen traffic falling drastically over the last few days. The result is a confluence of their 3 top portals – CricketNext, IBNLive, and MoneyControl. By the way – is Alexa biased against regional sites or does Josh18 really linger below English content sites? Anyone with information on that?
Incidentally when a group is launching an array of services, I think its better if they have one mother brand which can then be used to nurture all the other brands. It becomes a logistical and marketing nightmare to harness 16 different brands with different identities. There are no spill over effect, no positive externalities, all of them need separate budgets etc. We saw in automotive how GM succumbed to Toyota because of issues related to managing multiple brands – all of which were not successful. In the Internet Space too, Google offers tons of products and applications and the ‘G’ before the brand adds that force. They follow a more or less generic branding strategy. Web18 would have benefited if it did more of that. It would be interesting to see what the portal is called.

T.R. Madan Mohan, a managing partner at Browne and Mohan had another interesting point to make – “Rediff is valued at $200 million (Rs846 crore), while a vertical like Naukri (job portal) is valued at four times that. Sify has one-tenth the value of travel portal Makemytrip.”