Quick look at how lifestyle content portal MensXP has been faring after acquisition by Times Internet

It's close to a year since men's lifestyle portal MenXP.com was acquired by Times Internet Ltd (TIL). Post acquisition, TIL had merged one of its similar portals Guylife.com with MensXP. Techcircle.in spoke with its founder and now business head Angad Bhatia to quickly check how the site has been doing since then.

According to Bhatia, the site is now pulling in 9 lakh unique visitors monthly (against under 2 lakh a month before the acquisition and around 4.5 lakh in April) and around 40 per cent of this is coming from mobile.

"Growth in the overall reach was expected coming into the Times bandwagon, but what has also increased is the user engagement," according to Bhatia who attributed it to the sheer amount of resources that the firm has in terms of content—be it screened information, images, real-time updates and feeds which help them streamline the content.

The technology-backend on which MensXP is running was also completely revamped post acquisition by TIL and Guylife's team was merged with MensXP's team. As a result, mobile traffic has surged to more than double of what it was earlier.

Talking about monetisation strategy, Bhatia said that besides ads, the company is looking at content marketing. Calling it native content advertising, he said it helps brands in the conception, packaging, delivery as well as measuring the impact of the marketing content they produce. "We are very bullish on it. While it's also a form of advertising, it is a lot more native to readers and very analytic, which is helpful for brands," he stated. As of now, the company is not looking at any other streams for revenue generation.

Talking about plans for the mobile segment, Bhatia said the team is working on certain apps which would be more focused on categories and communities that it has on sit. Some of these apps could be launched before the end of this year.

Besides global competitor Askmen.com, MensXP competes with some other men's lifestyle portals like GQ India and Maximindia.in. MensXP.com was the maiden acquisition by TIL under its new chief Satyan Gajwani who went ahead with another acquisition by buying location-based restaurant recommendation app Gawbl last month.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)