Accentium Integrates StudyNation.com Into Taaza

Accentium Web Pvt Ltd, the company behind Gaadi.com, SecondShaadi.com, AdLift.com and DesiMartini.com has announced that StudyNation.com, an education website, has been integrated into Taaza.com as study.taaza.com, in line with the company's strategy to make Taaza.com a multi-vertical digital media property in the country. It has also launched a new homepage for Taaza.com in line with the positioning.

Vivek Pahwa, founder and director of Accentium said, "The Indian Internet market is largely segregated into three categories – media, classifieds and e-commerce. Classifieds is largely monetized offline in India at the moment, making a lot of the businesses hard to scale and unprofitable. We see a lot of opportunities in media and e-commerce."

The company aims to make Taaza.com a combination of independently focused verticals. The current verticals include classifieds (ads.taaza.com), job search (jobs.taaza.com), news (news.taaza.com), education (study.taaza.com), travel (travel.taaza.com) and finance (finance.taaza.com). The company will also launch movies and shopping verticals in early 2012.

Gurgaon based Accentium had earlier (in February 2011) sold Gaadi.com, an auto portal to MIH Internet and prior to that, the company made an exit from Desimartini.com, a social networking site, selling it to HT Media Ltd in November 2007. Besides Taaza.com, Accentium currently runs AdLift, a digital marketing solutions provider and SecondShaadi.com, a matrimonial site for second marriages. Earlier in an interview with Techcircle, Pahwa had talked about the company's plans to expand Taaza beyond India into other countries.

"We want to make Taaza.com one of the most visited sites in the country. One of the key verticals in Taaza will be shopping, which will start off with content and price comparisons across various product categories. This is also going to be our focus in the coming months." added Pahwa.

The company is also helping incubate a couple of models in the e-commerce space by providing technology, marketing and strategic support as well as investing at the early stage in select companies (names were not provided at the moment).

Merging portals could be the latest trend in the Indian consumer Internet space. Last year Vamoose Vacations Pvt Ltd (Vamoose.in), which was launched by TravelMart India Pvt Ltd, one of the early travel services providers in the country, had shut down and Manoj Gursahani, director of Vamoose.in and chairman of Travel Mart India had conveyed that the website had been merged back into the parent company TravelMart.