Page 139 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

126 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

On the very first page, titled “HUM: About Us,” we are presented with
this information: “Every month . . . over 10.1 million unique visitors . . . 127
countries . . . 107 million page views . . . drawing 4.2 Terrabyte bandwidth
per month . . . 849 sites linking to IndiaFM including MSN and Yahoo!” A
box placed below this text reads: “IndiaFM weekly Bollywood Newsletter has
over 1 million validated subscribers. No other Bollywood portal has as wide
a reach internationally as IndiaFM.” And in another box adjacent to this, a
“distribution of surfers” indicates that 49.2 percent of indiafm.com’s traffic
comes from the United States. Pointing to the text beneath the various per-
centages, which summarized that “overall, overseas territories constitute 77
percent of the total visitors to indiafm.com,” Mobhani asserted:

More than 70% of the traffic base is outside India and the key market
is North America, followed by E.U. about 10%, U.K. about 7%, Middle
East about 6%, and the Far East about 7%. If you look at the span, as a
global map of sorts, practically every place in the world there are Indi-
ans, Indiafm is accessed. Every month, more than 6 million wallpapers
are downloaded by fans around the world. 3 million odd screensavers are
downloaded and consumed every month. In fact, you’ll find that Indiafm
will be the logo most often seen on an NRI’s desktop if it has a Bollywood
wallpaper. That’s the extent of our reach, and that’s why we have become
the industry leader.

At one level, press kits are a part of any media company’s publicity efforts and
such declarations by industry executives do not necessarily offer any deep
insights. In fact, Mobhani’s statement does sound like a “corporate sript”
that he delivers on a regular basis at different venues. It is instructive to note,
however, that this scenario was played out in interviews I conducted with
professionals in other prominent dot-com companies such as Indiatimes and
Rediff, with every executive and content producer asserting that ‘NRI eye-
balls’ were what mattered the most. Omar Qureshi, who headed the team
of journalists, web designers, and software engineers at Indiatimes’ movies
division, offered his own spin:

When a producer comes to Indiatimes, what does he expect? From the
producer’s perspective, audiences within India get all their Bollywood
news through print, radio, and television. So if you lived in India, espe-
cially when Internet usage hadn’t taken off, when you had crappy con-
nections or you had to sit in a dingy cybercafé, naturally you wouldn’t go
online to read about a Bollywood film or the latest scandal. Things might