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Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory >> 137

every photograph.” Showing me around the office, he went on to explain,
“So we track interests, we get feedback, and the industry knows this. On an
hourly basis, not even a daily basis, we track web trends. We refresh those
pages every three minutes. If I’m going home now, it’s early morning in New
York, then London, and so on.” Pausing for a moment in front of a computer
screen, Qureshi turned to me with a smile and declared: “There is always an
Indian online.”
For a particularly telling instance of dot-com companies leveraging their
technical ability to measure audience response worldwide, let us turn once
again to indiafm.com’s trade magazine, 70MM. The July 2004 issue offered
industry insiders an “indiafm.com Research Exclusive” that promised to
chart which movies were “likely to be the biggest blockbusters of them all.”
The two-page spotlight begins by explaining that indiafm.com’s analysis was
based on an extensive fourteen-day survey that brought in 621,793 responses.
The results, tabulated to present an “India rank” and an “overseas rank,”
“were based on votes from 67 countries—countries which constitute about
98 percent of revenue towards Bollywood releases.” This poll, we are told,
“threw up several interesting results, generating quite a buzz in the indus-
try.” Evidence of this industry buzz is presented in the form of pithy quotes
from media executives. For instance, the vice president of Eros Multimedia,
Kumar Ahuja, commends the survey, saying, “indiafm research forms one of
the key inputs in our strategic planning for promotion of movies in each of
the key overseas markets. Indiafm has always been, and continues to remain,
an important reference for the Bollywood Trade, especially overseas.” This
survey, furthermore, was part of a larger shift whereby indiafm.com posi-
tioned the overseas territory within a weekly ritual of considerable impor-
tance in Bollywood—tallying box-office earnings. As Rajeev Masand, enter-
tainment editor at the television channel CNN-IBN, reflected, “Back in 2002,
when I was writing for Indian Express, I wrote about the Naaz Building being
the Bollywood Barometer. If you wanted numbers, the distributors and oth-
ers who had offices in the building had the numbers at their fingertips. But
now those numbers are online and yeah, when it came to the overseas mar-
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ket, these guys had no way of knowing.” Since 2004, the “trade” section of
indiafm.com, where reputed film journalist and trade analyst Taran Adarsh
compiles films’ earnings in the United States, U.K., and other markets on
a weekly basis, has emerged as the virtual equivalent of the Naaz Building
where knowledge regarding the “NRI audience” is generated and circulated.
Thus, for companies like indiafm.com and indiatimes.com, the ability to
generate knowledge about NRI audiences enabled them to locate themselves
in relation to Bollywood’s efforts to map, target, and monetize the lucrative