Internet users count in India is Skyrocketing and according to a recent statistics 60% of the online Indian population prefers to read (&write) in their native language. So every web services want to capture their share in the rapidly growing Indian regional language market and AOL is not an exception.

AOL, who already marked their presence in India with a India specific AOL portal, today launches news portals in Hindi and Tamil languages. The portals currently has four major verticles including News, Entertainment, Astrology and Literature. Surprisingly sports is missing as a separate category. As of now, only limited contents are available. It seems AOL is getting the contents from the online news portal, OneIndia of Greynium Information Technologies.

Bottomline: MSN India and Yahoo India had also launched regional portals but didnt show any improvement thereafter. I dont think their regional portals as much popular. IMO the reason is very simple. Simply launching a news portal and outsourcing the content to a third party news services will not work atleast for the Indian regional language market. Here every region has their own taste and preference. The site must not give an alinated feeling to the users and should be completely localised. I wish AOL will learn from their competitors mistake and will set up separate teams to concentrate on the regional portals.