Indian Railways website at indianrail.gov.in offers everyone with Ticket Reservations and related services, like the PNR Enquiry, Train Calendar, Train Time Table etc which are very much useful for the millions of travellers all over India.
The company is said to be in huge profits in the past few years and there are many reasons for this which includes Couriers & Parcels, Earnings from shipping of Coal, Steel, Stones, Sugar, irctc Catering etc essential goods. The passenger section includes fares taken under Tatkal scheme and high fares in A/C First Class & A/C 2 Tier. Now here is one of the best part of making money which Railways is adopting right now.
According to different website traffic measurement services on an average the Indianrail.gov.in website receives Daily Pageviews of around 10,86,956 ie around a million page views all of the pages showing different advertisements like Google Adsense, CPM ads from admagnet, Popup Ads etc. The lowest the CPM Ad agencies pay for the advertisements is 0.10$ and on an average big branded websites achieve atleast 1$ CPM rate because of direct advertisers and targetted visitors with high budgets. Now this 1$ CPM rate would mean that the Indian Railways gets paid 1 USD for every 1000 page views, while the Pop-up Ads normally range from 2$-4$ for different networks. Lets move towards the calculations part.
Approx Daily Page Views : 10,00,000
Approx Monthly Page Views : 3,00,00,000
The website displays 2 CPM Ad banners & 1 Popup Ad while we did a quick check, which means that on every page load 3 times a ad is displayed.
3 * 3,00,00,000 * 1$[CPM] / 1000 = 90000$ / month *12 = Approx 10 Crore Rupees / Year
These calculations are calculated on the basis of 1$ average CPM but as mentioned earlier big websites get excellent offers from the advertisers who would be ready to pay higher rates just for displaying their advertisements. The only hope is that the webmasters of this website which regularly goes down because of database and other issues reports all the Income it makes from the Online advertisements to the officials because we are pretty sure that
That’s Great ..!
I don’t think its great …. Its very shameful that a government website (.gov) is ladden with advertisements. which I am sure is reaped off by the webmasters.
Where as I am sure the Indian Railways can contact any leading IT Firm to make an advanced level website with a very little investment from the Gov.
This shows how backward our country is when it comes to Computing & Internet. Sorry to say but the CMS of the website and the design sucks !!
I was thinking about the whitehouse .gov site. I mean can’t we have a “indian.gov” site ?? or maybe having websites n all is western culture.
Dear Friend,
I absolutely agree with you. Indian railways website is not only a shame for the indian railways but also for the whole nation. The website is absolutly nonsensensical (this is a new word especially invented for the indian railways website). Adsense made 10 cr for the indian railways, but adsense has in a foolish way placed all the ads in such a heavy frmat athat a common man cannot just get rid of these ads.the website is too slow and absolutely sluggish. May God help the common man
Regards
Would love to place my ads for one day on the Indian Railway site. 😀
Awesome post, very innovative, we understand what must have been going in your head at the time of all this calculation.
I just hoped all your articles will come with the same amount of depth to themselves.
Wow, awesome calculations. Never knew the information.
interesting,Amit.what surprises me is that a gov site uses ads.is this the case in all countries?i thought gov sites are not used for generating profit at all.
Well they can make profits which can be used for the website maintenance costs etc but in this case i think the govt is not even reported about this 🙂
thanks for the reply,Amit.
I too agree with this. This was the first concern that arose in my mind when I first saw the ads on railway gov site. Ads income might not be reported
c’mon yaar wer r u ppl still. its shame that our govt is not even bothered abt this. im sure it might hav not even reached our gov account properly.
Just 2 days ago, I had visited indianrail.gov.in and I saw ads there, I doubted and suspected officials/webmaster of the site if they pay the earned money from ads to our government. No doubt with such visits, pageviews, it is a great source of income but you know our indian system (Right things in wrong hands).
On another note, thank you for the detailed calculations, I had not expected this much ads revenue.
This is really incredible..and exciting..good movement and encouragement for new bloggers..
I think they are not using Adsense from last 2 months. I am not finding any ads of adsense from last 2 months on their website . Earlier, every where was Google ads on Indianrail.gov.in . but now, they are using other ad network.
but irctc.co.in doesn’t has any ads !!!!!
Surely they are making money from this. But why indian railway site is putting ads? Now indian railway is in profit and they can make better and advance site.
Also, i never saw any brand name or bank or insurance company do this.
Actually, that is done by webmasters. Indian railways has displayed a warning message several time for not displaying any advertisement on their site and that they may take some action against such webmasters.
Its really not a good thing. I do agree with Dibayjyoti.
thts a lot of money for a website but compared to their size of the business they do its nothing..
to answer Debajyoti Das ..even i used to think like that earlier but why the hell we always compare ourselves to western countries … we all know a big % of their web business is managed in India other Asian countries
no doubt US and Europeans are good designers but doesn’t that mean we lack designing skills ..just look at local web designers, designs they make looks like they made it for some pamphlets or some print media with loads n load of photoshop effects ..
Well. If anybody here wanted to display their ads on indian railway site, they could have bid on the tender which was released few months back. Actually Indian Railway just invite tenders for the rights to display ad on their site and it must be some other company monetising it with the ads. But I wonder why don’t they themselves monetise it directly instead of giving other companies the right to monetise it. Maybe somebody here can file a RTI and figure out how much was paid for that right.
Nice for them 😉
any official release by them ? or just a prediction ?
Its Good that US money coming to India. it’ll make strong our economy
that’s the point 🙂
good that the money comes in India…..
it can be monitized in a better manner… 10 cr is much less for a indian railway website .. which get numerous no. of hits
Hey, Really i dont think they earn from adsense. I dont see any adsense ads there. I think they earn only from cpm ads.
Really government is also greedy of earning money.
Its not the Government which is greedy because for these kind of things, tenders are given . So the person who bagged the tender for maintaining the website is reaping huge profits from it , thats all…
Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) maintains the two most important Indian Railway web sites, http://www.indianrail.gov.in and http://www.trainenquiry.com . The web site http://www.indianrail.gov.in provides dynamic information like current PNR status of the passengers, availability of berths in all classes for the next 90 days and static enquiries like Train Between Important Stations, Reservations Rules, Fares, Refund, and Rules etc. The web site http://www.trainenquiry.com provides information on the running status of trains arrival/departure, timetable enquiry, special trains etc.
Both these sites collectively attract over 4.5 million users every month. (Source: comScore . Feb 2010).
Audiences visiting these sites are very net savvy and evolved users. The Indian Railways is the largest E-commerce player in India and the above two sites attract a large number of Online Transacting audiences.
The websites are designed to be very efficient, simple and easy for navigation giving users a brilliant and fulfilling experience.
The websites offer attractive advertising opportunities to advertisers and advertising agencies.
even though railway is making profit there is no harm in putting ads….
the ad revenue can be used for more developments
Yes, developements like filling up corrupt officers’ pockets 😛
i knew that !!!…indian railways is earning from everywhere, from rail advertisment to online ads to customer care calls(3 rs per minute), only sector of indian government which offer service to customer but charges for service….whenever train will be late, train cancelled , for money return everything you have to take care…….although this service can be made more flexible so that travellers get benefited which is possbile if implemented but who cares its indian government
with google adsense railway is making good amount of money.
even google has more amount than this compared to railway.
thanks amit for sharing this info
I still think it is a shame that a government site has adsense.
10 cores is not that huge for a government company that is the largest employer in the world.
Interesting information. Way2Sms is also another big websites which follows same trick. Thanks for share.
i am going to complain particular google advertisers and google that their ads are simply wasting money on indian railway site.
If the presented figures are true,its mind boggling stuff AMIT!!
Ohh … Great News I think they might cross top Technological blogs page views.Really great 🙂