Prince Khanna, Account Executive, Web18

In the world of internet, where English portals dominate, introducing Josh18, a vernacular portal and ensuring its success was the biggest challenge to Prince Khanna.

Prince Khanna, a graduate in business administration from IMS, Noida could have interned in banking, retail, insurance or telecom sector post his MBA but he chose a different medium instead. So when an opportunity with Quasar Media came along, he accepted it without any second thoughts.

At present, Khanna is associated with Web18 as an account executive. He owes his interest towards internet to his tryst with Quasar Media, where he understood that internet is still a very 'exclusive' medium. “Only a small percentage i.e. 40-50 million people use internet as compared to the huge population that India resides,” he adds. There he understood that internet has yet not got the recognition it deserves with only a few companies spending on internet as compared to traditional media.

It was 2006 when Khanna joined Josh18.com, where he was responsible for bringing revenue to the portal. He also efficiently handled the accounts of the company with timely collection of payments. It was during his course with Josh18 that he learnt the importance of developing a healthy working relationship with all his clients. He even ensured that all clients received timely and precise order processing.

Khanna counts his knowledge about the medium as his biggest strength. Other strong areas of this optimistic lad include communication, negotiating skills and straight forward attitude.

Ask him about the biggest project challenge he faced, and he is quick to add, “Introducing Josh18 was the biggest challenge due to the vernacular nature of the portal.” In fact, creating a niche for a vernacular website when English portals were more popular must have been a tedious task in itself. However, Khanna is positive that growth of internet users in the tier II and III class cities will add to more users.

Meanwhile, Khanna agrees that retaining client base during the slowdown period of '08-09 was also a big challenge. He agrees that the worst aspect was when companies were slashing out advertising expenditure during the gloomy slowdown phase. And online media which runs entirely on ad revenues got severely affected by this as compared to other mediums.

Amidst all this, Khanna maintains that online advertising is the sunshine sector of the advertising industry. Gradually, even advertisers are waking up to this fact, and are game to experiment with the online media. “Online media is the newest and most interactive media amongst other traditional media options, and thus will catch up soon with the advertisers as well as viewers,” says Khanna.

Quiz him about any advice to readers and he adds, “Performance is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP) of internet. Till few years back, this was how the concept of internet was explained to companies. But now performance has become a benchmark for all those who operate in the internet domain.” Moreover, today companies evaluate and buy online media on the basis of performance matrix. This trend has further added to the pressure of staying ahead with good quality and dynamic web portals.

Needless to say but today performance decides the fate in the internet domain. Initially performance was measured in CPC terms, but there seems to be no end to it with CPL, CPA and CPS also following the league.

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