Centre plans to earn revenue from its sites

New Delhi: With the new government using “new media” in a big way, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself has taken the lead, an idea is being floated to turn “popular official websites into revenue earning models”. Sources said that a plan is afoot in the National Informatics Centre (NIC), which builds and run all government portals, to catalogue different government websites as per their popularity so that spots on their pages could be created for prospective advertisers.

Sources said, such an arrangement has already been done in case of IRCTC website of the Railways, which attract a lot of advertisements generating additional revenue apart from what it generates from its normal operations of ticketing, tour packages etc.  

Presently the NIC has been tasked to classify all the government websites into three categories – first which has an average hit of more than a lakh per day, second between 50,000 and 1,00,00 per day and the third, which less than 50,000.

“Once this exercise is complete and exactly the sites are identified according to their number of hits, pages of government portals, would be re-worked to provide spots for prospective advertisers,” sources said.