While Rediff.com closed its Tamil and Telugu channels, Indya.com closed down its Hindi channel, but retained its Tamil channel. Earlier, Sify.com had closed its Kannada and Bengali channels.

Rediff.com and Indya.com explained that these language channels were not attracting enough revenue and page views to justify their continuance. For Sify.com, it was the lack of quality content that made it decide to close the Kannada and Bengali channels.

These apart, Tamil.com too was pulled out of the cyberspace, though the industry widely believed that Tamil sites had far better chance to succeed than other Indian languages sites because of the large presence of Tamilians all over the world, mainly in countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Indonesia and Mauritius.

So what is afflicting the Indian language portals? Why are there no takers for them though regional language television channels are blooming? Though barely 6 per cent of the worlds population knows English, as much as 99 per cent of the content available on the web is in English. According to R Ravichandran, founder-CEO of Tamil portal Aaraamthinai.com, net surfers do not prefer to read general news portals in Indian languages. It is only for language-specific content that the netizens log onto the Tamil portal.

Chennaionline director S Asokan says for news, users prefer to watch television or read newspapers in their mother tongue. But multi-lingual portal Webdunia.coms south India COO Hemant Chordia is optimistic about the future of language portals. His optimism is based on a recent NetBhasha survey conducted by NetSense, which revealed that 10 per cent of the Internet users prefer to use Indian languages. With the Internet connectivity spreading to smaller towns, the number of users is expected to increase further.

Poor literacy rates and lesser per capita computers are stated to be the two main obstacles hindering the growth of Indian language portals and websites. Yet another factor that is impeding the growth of language websites domestically is the bias of the content in favour of the NRI population.

While websites like Webulagam/Webdunia.com and Aaraamthinai.com do offer localized content, national-level players like Rediff.com failed to satiate the interest of domestic web surfers mainly because the thrust of its content has always been on catering to the needs of NRIs, says S Senthilnathan, editor, Kanimozhi, a Tamil computer magazine.

Citing print publications that are focused on personal finance, travel, science and technology, Senthilnathan says that websites that are focused on these subjects would succeed in the long run.

But R Venkatesh, editor, Sify.coms Tamil channel, differs: We have detailed our requirements and the content provider has to dovetail his offerings accordingly. It all depends on how one extracts work from the content providers. Sify.com outsources most of its content. He attributes the closure of several Indian language sites to their not sticking to prudent business principles.

Indian language portals could also not attract revenues from advertisers. With the dotcom bust, advertisers are reluctant to spend on websites. With venture capitalists refusing to finance dotcom projects, the language portals have begun cutting costs by downsizing their staff.

With a view to attracting revenue from advertisements, Aaraamthinai.com has started bringing out a print magazine, Thendral, which is distributed free among the subscribers of the portal in the US. The magazine, containing the content of the portal, is composed in Chennai and printed and distributed in the US. The magazine is getting enough advertisement revenues to meet its cost. Webulagam.com and its parent webdunia.com sell their content to other websites. The company has been bridging the gap between expenditure and income. Since the company has a diverse business streams, which includes media services division and technology sales division, the income from these shall help us break even fast, says Choradia.

Webdunia has invested around $2.8 million so far. At the moment, the highest revenue is trickling in from the Hindi portal. However, matching investments have also gone into the Hindi portal. On standalone basis, we anticipate that the other language portals shall start breaking even at a relatively early stage, he says.