Is networks 18 news portal Firstpost mimicking Huffingtonpost?

Networks 18 one of the most popular media group of India which hosts many popular news channels like CNBC-TV18, CNBC Awaaz, CNN-IBN, IBN7, IBN-Lokmat etc had recently launched their news portal called Firstpost. Networks 18 group has all its websites listed under Web 18 group having many portals for news, jobs, shopping, travel,cricket etc. Some of their websites include homeshop 18, yatra etc. 

Raghav Bhal who is the Founder and Editor of Network18 says their network has wedded to news and web, and he also mentioned web 18 to be one of the fastest and largest growing internet venture. He also added mentioning Firstpost to be their new offspring of Web 18 networks.

Raghav Bhal

Now coming to Firstpost it is being headed by R Jagannathan who acts as the Editor in Chief. They are also having a tie up with nytimes for their images and cartoons. 

Some similarities between Firstpost and Huffingtonpost:

1. Domain name: 

Their is already a website with the same domain Firstpost suffixed with dot co dot Uk which is an England based website. In spite of that Web 18 chooses their domain name to be Firstpost suffixed with dot com. The domain name has a rhyming end namely post, which can surely make some of us think Firstpost to be the Indian Huffingtonpost.

2. Homepage View:

As soon as you view Huffingtonpost you will find a big screen of some latest news welcoming the visitors. Initially Firstpost too had the same experience when someone landed in the home page. But as Firstpost site is still under construction they have modified the large image and adjusted it to left side.

3. Three Columns in the content section:

They way of placing the articles in the body section is also same as Huffingtonpost. The three column body having some of the posts written by top contributors are place towards the left, the middle coloumn has news from various topics with images heading them and the right column is the only column which is not so similar to that of huffing.

4. Website Tags:

When you roll your mouse pointer over to the tab of Huffingtonpost you will find words which say Breaking News and Opinion on Huffingtonpost. Similarly when you observe it for Firstpost you will find something like Breaking, India, Politics, World, Business, Sports, Books and Bollywood News and Opinion. So the words Breaking  News and Opinion are matching. 

5. Header Section:

Just above the header you will find a section called Big News which are nothing but most popular and important news which happened recently. Similarly Firstpost too has a similar area called trending which also is about popular news which is being most searched.

Though the web designers may change the look and placement of various articles in mean time we can assume that Huffingtonpost was the main inspiration and idea behind Firstpost. One of the networks 18 website called in dot com is also the top most visited Indian website. I wish Firstpost will have a lot more in upcoming days.