Web18 Reorganization: Khiani Appointed COO For Content, Thomas COO For Financial Properties
By Nikhil Pahwa - Thu 01 May 2008 06:48 AM PST
Web18, the Internet and Mobile company from the Network18 group has reorganization its operations into two separate groups: Financial and Content verticals, contentSutra has learned from sources. Rishi Khiani, who had joined Web18 when his company UrbanEye Media was acquired by the Network18 group, has been appointed the Chief Operating Officer (COO) for the Content verticals and the horizontal portal In.com. The Content vertical includes portals like ibnlive.com, cricketnext.com, tech2.com, indiwo.com, josh18.com, among others. Khiani confirmed his appointment and the restructuring to contentSutra.
Joyson Thomas, among Moneycontrol.com’s first employees, has been appointed COO of the Financial properties. He will be responsible for properties like Moneycontrol.com, Indiaearnings.com, Poweryourtrade.com, Storeguru.com, CompareIndia.com and also Mobile18. Additionally, Roshan Tamang has been appointed Managing Editor and VP of News, Entertainment and Sports. He’s been involved with the web operations of companies like India Today, Indian Express and Times Internet.
Update: Web18 informs us that their CTO Varun Singh will continue to head tech2.com and biztech2.com, Vidya Kumaraswamy’s role has been expanded to VP & Managing Editor for Finance and Lifestyle portals.
Update: Please refrain from making personal comments against company execs. We’re closing comments for this post.
Posted in: Companies, Network18, Web18, Industry Moves
Web18 has posted losses this year again, and will continue to do so for next few years unless some clear strategy evolves.
The only decent products from these stable that have held some ground are Yatra (in fire from Cleartrip), Moneycontrol (in fire from Rediff Moneywiz), Tech2 and recent acquisition of BookMyShow.
Reshuffling & reorganizing cannot be a strategy to turn arround things, which they desperately need to. Going ahead they may again consolidate their offerings in next two years. The basic problem may be in the fact that the people leading this group are not amongst the ones who have defined/re-defined internet products.
Ananya the company is in investment mode as per their financials thats why there are losses on the book but their revenues have doubled. not sure if you have a clear understanding of how internet companies work or scale up. Most companies do not post profit during the first couple of years. thats the period usually spent on ramping up infrastructure, customer aquisition via online marketing or advertsing product improvements etc etc take a look at amazon, ebay or closer home rediff.com with most other smaller VC funded companies you never get to see the losses as they don’t have to disclose it but trust me they burn thru millions even before they have their own monitization stratagy figured out.
What happened to webchutney ??
Webchutney is a Capital18 investment, not an acquisition.