The comment contest winner

As you may know, I have been running a comment contest for last 3 weeks. There were two reasons why I ran this contest. One, I wanted to increase the interaction among the visitors on this blog and two, to find out if this kind of contest improved readership and traffic.

To be honest, on both counts, the response has not been too good. Add to it, the problems I faced with commenting on this blog for last week. The comment database got corrupted last week and I lost 5-6 comments and also a lot of comments went into spam folder. It never happened earlier (atleast thats what I think), but since I started this contest, I made it a point to check the spam comments to see if some genuine comments were trapped by Akisment (WordPress anti-spam plugin). To my surprise, atleast 2-3 comments daily were not visible as they used to go in spam folder. By the way, I receive huge spam comments as of today it shows that in last 5 months I have recd. 67,241 spam comments.

Now coming back to the contest, Trak.in received around 46 comments since the time contest started that made the cut (out of total 83). As mentioned in my comment detail post, if blog receives less that 50 comments, the contest stands invalid. However, I am not going to do that, as there are readers who have made genuine efforts to give quality comments.

After my initial round of filtering, I came up with 7 comments that were in the running. However, the winning prize goes to the comment written by Amit Puri on What is it with this Indian stock Market?

There is actually a very simple explanation for the Indian market behaving this way:
1 – Every time Fed cuts interest rates, there is a lot of money to be poured into the world markets
2 – Due to the several restrictions posed on FDIs and FIIs by the Indian regulators, most of the American fund managers shied away from pouring in money in the Indian markets
3 – Unfortunately for them the India growth story did not burst out and keeps on adding to the mass
4 – This leaves the fund managers with 2 choices. a) Continue to keep ignoring the Indian market and get fired if the growth story continues or b) Invest in the India market at the ridiculous prices prevalent today
5 – Fortunately for them, choice (b) presents a win-win situation. If they invest and the market goes down, everyone else goes down with them and they will not get blamed. And if the market keeps rising they keep getting fatter bonuses. So the choice is clear, they need to invest in the Indian market
6 – If we now consider just 100 such funds worldwide and if we consider that on average they raise just $100 MM each (biggies like chrys capital have just raised $ 5 BN for an India fund) for the India fund, that makes it $ 10 BN to be put into the India market.
7 – The total Indian market size is relatively small and such a huge investment can take it to dizzying heights
8 – And that gentleman is what you are currently witnessing.

PS – It is not the Indian investors who are fueling this run. In fact they are all cashing out.

The comment was insightful and based on research and facts and aligned completely with the post that I had put up. Amit will take home $50 for this comment.

Yes, the comment contest was for $100, but as I mentioned that the contest got less that 50 comments, instead of making the contest invalid, I am giving $50 as prize money.

Other commentators who were in the top running were from

• Jolsna on India’s Internet usage lowest in Asia – Google scores lowly
• Raja Agrawal on Yahoo follows Google with oneSearch SMS.
• Indian Blogger on Indian Internet subscribers increase 69 times: Can we call it an Internet Boom?
• R2I on What is the future of Rupee? Is Dollar going to appreciate?
• Ramarao MS on Relation of Rising Rupee to Bollywood and Indian Mangoes… Hilarious ! that was meant for this post
• Digital Dude on Indian TV Ads: Is it worth spending Rs. 3,50,000 for 10 second?

My congratulations to Amit and to all the readers who participated. Even though the first contest did not generate response as much as I would have liked, there are more contests planned in coming months with different structure

I would love to hear readers suggestion on this whole exercise.