Google-BSE alliance yet to bear fruit

The Bombay Stock Exchange’s bid to monetise its website, one among a series of moves aimed at augmenting its revenue streams as contributions from its main exchange business dwindle, is yet to take off.

Revenues from the advertisements on its website have not been significant, around six months after Asia’s oldest exchange tied-up with Google to turn its popular website, bseindia.com, into a money spinner.

“The beta phase of the Google tie-up for advertisement is currently going on. Currently, the revenues from advertisement on BSE website is not significant,” said Ashish Chauhan, deputy chief executive officer at the Bombay Stock Exchange.

“Once the beta phase is successfully completed, BSE will take further decision on expanding the number of pages on which the advertisement will be served,” he said.

The move was seen as part of a series of attempts to set up revenue streams in addition to its core exchange activity, where its share of the business has been dwindling.

The Bombay Stock Exchange accounted for 20.71% of the trades which happened in the cash segment and has almost nil share of the derivative segment in January.

The tie-up with Google is expected to help leverage its position as one of the highest viewed websites in India.

Web information company Alexa ranks the BSE website at 191 in India in terms of the traffic it recieves, as per data towards the last week of January.

The high number of page views is not as much a positive for BSE as it maybe for other websites, suggest some experts.

The website generates very high page views per visit because there are people constantly refreshing to see the latest stock quote - almost like in a cricket site where you have people always refreshing to see the score.

This makes it difficult to charge advertisers on the basis of number of impressions, or times an advertisement is shown on the screen.

A more viable model maybe to charge advertisers for action taken or clicks and targeting users with ads on the basis of  their search behaviour and context.

“This behaviour is deterrent to people noticing the ad and clicking through which brings down an advertisers willingness to pay on impression basis,” said Bhavin Turakhia founder, chief executive officer and chairman of the Directi Group, which runs an internet traffic monetisation business.

Ashees Raina, principal research analyst at the Indian arm of technology market researcher Gartner Inc, said it would be premature to talk about the specific tie-up that Google and BSE had.

“Advertising in general is still an evolving phenomenon on the internet medium and the revenue models around that are yet to attain the same degree of maturity as traditional mediums like broadcast or print,” he said.

“As such there is no poster-boy sort of success case in India when it comes to online advertising.”

A demographic analysis from Alexa suggests that the users of the website are mainly males who access the website from their place of work.

A majority of them are between 25-34 years of age.

After the main website, which was used by 97.7% of those accessing the website, users prefer the the Gujarati subdomain of website, gujarati.bseindia.com, which receives 1.2% of the traffic.

The subdomains hindi.bseindia.com and charting.bseindia.com account for 0.7% and 0.3% of the traffic.