The youth space is very crowded and competitive right now, with a whole lot of dotcoms vying for the attention of the same section. But Starrss.com will be able to carve out a niche for itself, because it is not just for the youth, but by the youth, says Nanik Ramchandani, vice-president, Millennium Infocom Technologies.

According to him, the site will stand out because of an innovative strategy adopted by the company. For starters, it has created seven animated persons, and given them the names of characters in popular movies-for instance, Anjali, Rahul, Tina (which were the names of Kajol, Shah Rukh Khan and Rani Mukherjee in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai). Next, the company got 2,000 students from the Delhi University to fill in their personal profiles and selected seven people from the list. "For the next six months, the faces of these seven youngsters will be given to these characters and these people will be in charge of running the seven different channels on our site," adds Ramchandani.

According to him, "We are looking for people with certain profiles." For instance, the sports channel will be handed over to a sports freak, who can run the channel and interactive sessions, quizzes, etc. Similarly, a person interested in astrology would be picked up for running the astrology channel. Other categories are music, heart solutions, canteen talk, fashion street, movie magic, etc, which will be run by youths who have an interest in these areas.

"The idea behind getting college-going youth to run the channels is that they know more about today's trends than we do. Besides, things in our times were different and we would never be able to comprehend what is in vogue today", says Ramchandani, who is all of 27 years old. For instance, the TV programmes they like, the clothes, places, movies, everything is very dynamic and changing all the time.

The generation gap is more visible today than it was ever before and people out of college usually do not have the faintest idea about what the youth is really looking for, he adds. Moreover, the learning curve is very fast on the Net.

Ramchandani admits that the site is very Delhi-centric right now and hopes that soon Starrss.com will be able to offer more customised fare for youth in the other metros: "We have started off with Delhi. Next we will launch a customised site for Bombay, which will be run by Bombay students. This will be followed by Calcutta and Bangalore."

Meanwhile, the company which will be investing only Rs 15 lakh on the site during the course of the entire year, hopes to recover costs from advertising. The company also plans to leverage all its existing sites, which get nearly 0.5 million page views a month, to promote the new site. "Having different sites makes cross-advertising very easy and we can offer a good variety to advertisers coming to our site." The company, which recently launched a free Web-based capital market course on stocks called www.CapitalMarketAcademy.com, also has three other Websites in its kitty: MITclassfieds.com, MITgreetings.com, and MITemail.com.