The company has come a long way since it's previous round of funding late last year when Contests2Win.com raised Rs 9 crore by shedding 20 per cent equity to ICICI and eVentures each. Contests2win specializes in creating and hosting contests and games for about 250 brands. Among them are names like Pepsi, MTV, Pantene, Elle, Titan, Close Up, Kenwood and HMV and all the Hindustan Lever brands. The company has recently lured R.Sridhar, the direct marketing specialist from O&M and Cyrus Hoshidar from MTV as part-time consultants by offeringequity stakes. T. Ranganath, former general manager, marketing, Pepsi has joined the company on a full-time basis to take charge of marketing.

C2W started implementing its revenue model last month when it began to charge brand owners a fee for it's services. The contests and games were being hosted absolutely free of charge until then. "We now charge them under three heads: hosting, creative, response and servicing," says Kejriwal.

Kejriwal feels that the feedback in terms of `response' that C2W is able to offer brand owners is unique. "We can for instance tell the brand owner who exactly has participated in his brand (ie through gaming or contesting) - detailed profiles, demographics are available with us given the fact that participants register with us before taking part in a contest. This is unique data for the brand owner," he states.

C2W currently has about 1,70,000 registrations across 900 cities. The site has recently developed two properties which it hopes to export to international takers aswell. These are `Polls2Win and `Opinions2Win' where participants win prizes based on the quality of opinion or if they are among the majority in an opinion poll. "The prize is free Internet time so the whole thing is really seamless" explains Kejriwal.