Information Madness

BharatStudent.com, call it a Social Networking site for students (Indian Students) or video portal site. When I heard about this site, I was thinking of some useful website where Indian students can find education related or career related information.

The site was launched at Taj and Celebrity Priyanka Chopra was the one who raised the curtain. If you look at the statistics of the site, you would be surprised. According to the company (Looks like a UK Based company, Axill Europe Ltd) it has 1.4 million registered users. The company hires students as campus representatives for a monthly fee that varies from Rs 4,000 for India-based students to $500 (Rs 20,500) for Indian students on overseas campuses. Why do they hire these students ? I will get to that point in a minute.

So if I talk about the site, it has few categories for you to surf around. Friends, Study Abroad, Cafe Bharat, "Earn Part Time", Campus TV, Blogs and recently launched Campus Awards(This was launched by not so famous but who thinks i-am-a-big-star celebrity Jiya Khan).

Looks like the site has got some negative responses from the internet community and is labled as a "Biggest Spammer". Apparantely, the site sends spam messages into community websites like Orkut or Facebook driving visitors to BahratStudent.com. And the spam messages are like the following ones.

• Hot Video of N**e Actress Ravina Tempting for Sex
• 10th student press a mteacher b@@bs in bus

Devang has written a detail analysis about "Bharatstudent.com - the biggest SPAM?"

One thing I don't understand about Indian video sharing sites is "Why its always about celebrity, movies, TV commercials and P@RN? Everytime I see an Indian community website, it ends up having all these adult posts and adult movie clips and those websites attract more traffic. Take IndianPad for example, The site is a digg clone for Indian community. Few months back, I was looking at their "Who is online and who is doing what?" I saw majority of the online users were in "Adult Section".  I know sex sells and people take advantage of it but it should not be on sites like BharatStudent.com. You advertise about this website on national television and when you visit the site, you end up watching rape videos, MMS clips of fake indian actresses and what not.

There should be some marketing ethics for internet as well. You can't just spam the internet just to attract visitors and get more revenue. Now let me get back to the point about Why do they hire these students? What I think is that they are hiring these students who in their absolute wisdom shower their Porny presence in various forums. And using these kind of side-kicks, they are spamming the whole internet.

They have their "Earn part Time" section where the job profiles look like below

BS Ambassadors: Promoting BS among the fresh graduates, Organizations

Campus TV Reporter: Uploading the Videos of the latest and hottest happenings in and around the Schools, Colleges, Work places etc..
Campus TV Reporters can earn USD 2.00 for Every Video that has 1000 Unique Views.

So is it possible that those who are willing to make some extra money, are spamming the internet in the name of BharatStudent? If thats the case, BharatStudent should take some serious action against them to stop this abusive content on the internet.

Please feel free to post your views/comments about BharatStudent.com.