Peer Pressure?

Yesterday, Contentsutra carried a story about Times Business launching a professional networking site called Peer Power. The post also mentioned that the new site wouldn’t be leveraging Times Jobs.

Like I commented there, I’m still trying to understand why they are (seemingly) adamant about not leveraging their existing properties in print, on a new media platform. I look at Times Matrimonial vs Simply Marry, Times Ascent vs Times Jobs vs (now) Peer Power, Times Property vs Magic Bricks, and i wonder.

As Nikhil had replied to my comment there, I’m not even thinking of sales teams… a bit of branding, yes, but not just that. I see a lot of content that the different properties have, I also see the equity they have managed to create, and then I don’t see them leveraging it enough on the www. I somehow can’t agree to the differentiated target audience logic, because even given the ‘Metromonial site’ tag that Simply Marry has, the very fact that the group advertises the net properties heavily on print means that a large proportion of the TG can still be found among the publications’ readers.

For me, its more of a long term strategy thing. While newspaper readership in India is not going to end in quite a while, new media is definitely on the rise, and the Times Group is in a perfect position to utilise all the properties offline as a bridge to enter the web, simply because it has all the relevant content. So, why do both Times Ascent and Times Jobs exist? Why does Times Property have a fair, why not magic bricks? And if they both do, why separate ones?

The only reason I can think of is a kind of valuation game which involves a separation of entities in the two media platforms (BCCL and Times Business Solutions). In that case, having synergies between the two sets of properties would work against them, but that still doesn’t answer Times Jobs vs Peer Power. Or does Shine have anything to do with it?

While on the subject of old and new media, this is a great read. (via this)

until next time, so, where does this entity fit in?