[by Cerius Shah]Social Media India, the company behind social networking portal Bharatstudent.com, has announced plans of launching an online platform for buying and selling ad inventory on TV. A subsidiary of Northgate Technologies, they have struck a deal with Tamil music channel, Isaiaruvi TV, owned by the Kalaignar TV network. According to agencyfaqs, they are also the official selling agency for TV5, the Telegu news channel.

Northgate runs an ad network called Axill, which claims to have “thousands of web publishers”, so this appears to be their foray into traditional media inventory. Currently, 9X sells its own TV inventory via its Advalue packages and ETV does the same via ETVNetmart.com. The biggest player was helmed to be the Sandeep Goyal chaired Lastminuteinventory.com, which was expected to launch in Diwali, but is still behind a login wall. The models however are different, with LMI selling unused inventory and 9x and ETV giving it all on the basis of a premium rate card.

Nikhil adds: I just checked the earnings report (pdf) of Northgate Technologies: for the nine months ending December 31st, they had revenues of Rs. Rs. 388.58 crores with 99.43 percent revenues from online advertising business. Revenues from their own properties - bharatstudent.com (social networking), egglad.com (gaming), Ziddu.com (file hosting) - was Rs. 58.06 crores. Northgate had a net profit of Rs. 52.65 crores for the nine months. For the quarter, Northgate had online advertising revenues of Rs. 140.48 crores, Bharatstudent has a userbase of 3 million users, and generated mover 60 million pageviews per month (they’ve quoted Alexa, so not reliable). Northgate also has a VoIP business: Globe7.com.