When Alok Kejriwal founded Contests2win.com, a brand promotional site, in 1998, he had no idea that he would go on to become one of India’s first entrepreneurs in the digital space.
Palying to win: Kejriewal. Hemant Mishra / Mint
“I was working in my father’s socks-making company and I had a fair idea of the workings of the Internet and just started toying with business opportunities in this space,” he says. He approached various Fortune 500 companies with his idea of setting up a website for brands to host contests, and in no time, had at least 100 of these companies, including PepsiCo. Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and Hindustan Unilever Ltd, as clients.
A serial entrepreneur, Kejriwal launched Mobile2win India Pvt. Ltd, a mobile marketing firm, in 2003; it was acquired three years later by Norwest Venture Partners. In 2004, he rolled out Media2win India Pvt. Ltd, a full-service digital marketing agency, and as if to complete the pie, he launched Games2win India Pvt. Ltd, a gaming company, in 2007.
With the Ficci-KPMG Media and Entertainment Industry Report, released this year, projecting that the personal computer (PC) and online gaming industry in India, which stood at Rs978.6 million in 2008, would grow at a compounded annual growth rate of at least 36% through 2013, Kejriwal is sprucing up his revenue model. He is getting into games that require consumers to pay small amounts even as he plans an extensive network to improve advertising revenue. He is now looking beyond India and aims to be among the Top 10 players in the world in casual flash games.
Games2win’s latest launch is an application called InviziAds, which tackles piracy, a problem that plagues the gaming industry. A revenue-generating tool, InviziAds helps the website make money even when its content is being pirated through the installation of invisible ads on stolen content. Today, Games2win is ranked among the world’s Top 50 online gaming companies by comScore Inc., a global Internet research firm. It is visited by consumers in at least 200 countries and has recorded at least six million unique visitors a month.
In an interview, Kejriwal goes into the details of the InviziAds concept and talks about the current trends in the gaming space. Edited excerpts:
What is InviziAds?
There are 500 legal sites that have original legal creators, while there are 50,000 websites that copy this content...even we are present on 5,500 non-licensed sites. And within 2-3 minutes of a fresh game going live, they start appearing on these sites.
So we thought, why not befriend piracy? We came up with the idea of InviziAds, which has games pre-loaded with invisible advertisements which appear automatically when they get picked up on non-licensed sites. This helps us make money because advertisers paying to be present on these games know they are getting the required visibility on these sites.
What are some of the key trends you see in the online gaming space?