Eenadu launches portal for women

The Telugu language newspaper has extended its property Vasundhara Kutumbham to online media to reach out to a wider women audience.

Telugu language daily Eenadu has started an all women's portal titled Vasundhara Kutumbham (http://vasundhara.net/) that aims to reach out to Telugu women all across the country. The language portal is an extension of its exclusive property, Vasundhara Kutumbham that is already present as an exclusive daily women's page in the Telugu paper, a year-long on ground activation and a television programme titled 'Sakhi'.

When it began as a daily page in Eenadu, the idea was to create an exclusive platform for interaction with the Telugu women in Andhra Pradesh and an offering for the advertisers. The on ground activation was later launched to train women in different vocations and give empowerment lessons. Today, it has nearly 60,000 registered members who opt for paid and free lessons.

The new portal is a medium to connect with modern Telugu women of all ages. It will provide content on heath, cookery, daily news, beauty, housekeeping, technology, entrepreneurship and other important areas that women prefer to read. Seven dedicated columnists address areas of Fitness & Yoga, Interior Designing, Jewellery Designing, Self Defence, Gardening, Career Guidance, Corporate Grooming and Image Consultancy.

The portal has been launched with a mix of owned and syndicated content from other portals. It was launched on the Womens' Day and has a dedicated team for curating the content. The editor in chief for the portal is Ramoji Rao, who is also the founder of the Telugu daily.

A J Christopher, head, sales and marketing, Eenadu, says, "We wanted to go online for a long time, but prior to that wanted to reach a threshold in our on ground community. Also we wanted to clearly identify the needs of young women, and that understanding took us time. The portal has been launched after a thorough research and feedbacks from the audiences."

The platform will be available for the advertisers to reach out to different women target groups. Eenadu's news portal experiences 60 per cent domestic traffic and 40 per cent international traffic; it expects a similar composition of traffic for the women's portal, too.

Christopher adds that with this portal, it wanted to scale up its women audiences. "Today there is a lot of interaction that women have on a global scale, and many of them have also moved abroad. Also, the women who began reading the print page (Vasundhara Kutumbham) when it was launched 22 years ago, have children who are brought up in modern society, so it is high time we cater to them, too."

The portal will be promoted via the newspaper medium, on ground activities and web portals. The paper also plans to take the on ground activity across to the hi-tech city in Gurgaon in the next phase of the promotions.

The paper claims it the first such portal in the Telugu market.

Eenadu was launched in Visakhapatnam in 1974. In 1978, the fourth edition of Eenadu was launched and it was then that this publication beat existing papers like Andhra Prabha and became the leader in Andhra Pradesh.

In 1987, Eenadu was the first newspaper to execute the idea of 'district newspapers'. It was also the first in the country to launch a coloured page, Vasundhara, exclusively for women, in 1992. This came at a time when newspapers were considered to be mostly read by men.

Following the electronic boom in 1995, Eenadu was the first newspaper group to start an infotainment channel, ETV, which later grew to become a large bouquet.