Quick Note On IPL Live Streaming Revenues
Going by YouTube’s own numbers (as of 9:30 AM, May 12, 2011), the channel seems to have recieved about 5.7 million views so far this month, which is also the month of the IPL. Going with a CPM of Rs. 200 for the pre-rolls, that would have generated about Rs. 11 lakh in revenue so far. The channel has four banner spots when the live match is on. Even if you go with the really unrealistic assumption of Rs. 200 CPM for each of those slots the total revenue would add up to less than Rs. 60 lakh so far. Even if we were to blindly double the numbers (2x everything), the revenue is not going be more than Rs. 2 crore. I’m being extremely cavalier with the numbers here and erring massively on the side of overestimation.
Now, why is this important? Simple reason is that the rights holders need to monetize at the rate of about Rs. 65 crore per year to even break even on what they paid for the rights. There is also streaming of the clips on Indiatimes itself, which should bring in additional revenue and other aspects like mobile should chip in chunks on their own, but I don’t see it all adding up to Rs. 65 crore this year. Granted, the numbers maybe way off from what is actually the case (the slots could also be spot than CPM, making the estimates entirely invalid) and the consortium that got the rights were rushed into selling it at the last moment and they could do a better job next year, but the bottom line is that monetizing this right is going to be tough. Really tough, in fact.
Read MoreOf Missed Opportunities In Indian Media
Publishing content online is 2/4th measurement, 1/4th experimentation and 1/4th instinct. It is sometimes a science, sometimes an art and a lot of other times blind guesswork. After reading the Afaqs story that asked whether print publications in India are getting their story wrong in online, my thoughts went back to the year 2000, when I started out in online media in India. In the years since, I have worked in a variety of media publications and in various roles (editorial, technology, product, operations etc) and if there is one thing that I have seen done wrong consistently, it is that we never get the measurement part of it right.
But, I must digress here for a bit, for the noise surrounding pay walls and the end of free content online has been near-deafening of late. While I did spend reasonably lengthy amounts of time with The Indian Express, Indiatimes and CNN-IBN, my rather-confusing CV does not always mention two smaller stints in the years since 2000. The first was with a publication called The News Today, which was later renamed to The Newspaper Today. The second was a pathbreaking product called Tehelka. I did not last at either of those two places, I won't start on why, for those are reasons that don't fall under the scope of this post.
The difference in those two websites from the many other media websites that used to be online from India was that both were online-only publications. While Tehelka is for many readers a niche activist print magazine, in its first avatar the magazine was an online-only publication. Even though most of the notoriety associated with it was due to the spy-cam episode, the website had original content over which much effort and money was spent. The Newspaper Today was the online-only newspaper by India Today Group Online (ITGO), from a time before when Mr. Purie went rogue on digital and spent the following years undoing some good work the group had done earlier.
Both were ambitious projects. Both were products that were way too ahead of its time. But the cost structures involved in both products at that stage were impossible to sustain. I highly doubt if the outcome would be any different if those two products were to be launched again in 2010. In the years that followed, I left Tehelka and then The Newspaper Today (where I filled in for a week while a certain P.V. Sahad was looking after the business section) and went on to work at other media houses. India Today tried doing a pay wall with its magazine sites, which also came to naught. Tehelka fought for its survival in what became a political battle, the old website and concept was killed and it later emerged as a print magazine. ITGO became India Today Group (Not) Online and Mr. Purie wiped out the years from 2000 – 2005 from his memory.
So, is there a point to this post? Yes, there is one. It is a point that is missed almost entirely by the digital content publishing fraternity in India. The first is that we don't measure anything right. Measuring right is not just getting the distinction between your 'hits' and 'page views' right, it is also has to much with the ability within online media set ups here to delude themselves year in and year out. This is the typical conversation that happens between editorial and management in most operations:
Management: Okay, we have done n million this month. Your target for the month to come is two times n million. Can we do it?
Editorial: I do not think so, but we can try.
Management: I don't care. Just get me the results.
What follows is the usual predictable cycle. Editorial will use every trick in the trade to push up numbers (slide shows, steamy stories, 200-word stories that paginate thrice, iframes and whatnot). There is a marginal uptake in the numbers (especially if it has been an eventful month) and in the next review, after management expresses its disappointment with the two times n not being accomplished, the sign that there is some uptake is cited as going in the right direction and the same conversation and events are repeated.
I am not touching the concept of SEM in all of this. Doing SEM for news content is outright wrong. The value in publishing news for companies is to get sustained usage. SEM rarely succeeds in doing that. Additionally, the cost per click for event-based keywords are often obnoxiously high, resulting in user acquisition numbers that can never be offset by the inventory it generates.
Across the board there is a significant lack of internal honesty within media companies to address the issue of measurement. In the ten-years that I have worked in the companies, I have rarely seen a news website (please exclude business websites that do portfolio managers from the list) clock over 2 million page views in a day as an average in India. I find it impossible to believe that even with the small addressable opportunity we have here, the 2MM glass ceiling is still there, which is reflective of issues that have little to do with the opportunity size itself.
For years we have now run after the following metrics: page views, visitors and unique visitors. Everything is set, measured, sliced and diced based on this. As long as those three determinants are positive, everyone is happy. Management will then pile on to the sales team to flog the new inventory. But what exactly do the people who buy that inventory get for the money they spend? They get splits according to geography and in certain cases splits based on content categories. Thankfully, at least in some of the organizations there are now numbers being tracked in terms of cost per user and cost per page view, but these are only used to set targets for sales teams.
The part that I am getting to is that we do not think of our readers as nothing but a means to generate more inventory. There is no real engagement of the user. There are users who invest real time and effort into interacting with our products, but in India we have no culture of nurturing them. And no, don't give me that drivel about crowd-sourcing. I have done that for a few years and let me tell you, it is more expensive to maintain and curate than internal content. Anybody who will tell you that crowd-sourcing is the fix to all your ailments has never run something of that sort at a decent scale.
The fact is that unless we change the economics of doing online news in India or the model (from top-bottom to bottom-top), we are going to be exactly where we are not even a few years down the line. I do sympathize greatly with the opinions expressed in the Afaqs piece, but really, you don't more of the same beaten-to-death strategy that refuses to work and expect different results. What I fear for is that this 'introspection' of sorts by them will be used as a cover to gloss over the significant issues the industry itself won't look at and it will eventually result in a situation where everyone will scale down and kill any possible innovation across the board.
Read MoreHow To Not Fail In Indian Internet: A Proposal
Abinash Tripathy lays it out, in pretty good detail, the litany of things that are wrong with the great Indian media companies in how they are going to blow it with the opportunities in the online domain. I have added my two bits in the comments there and I have written quite a bit on the subject here and elsewhere, so I won't add to the chorus that is already cooking up a hit record there now.
Over the past couple of months I realized that there is too much energy and effort that is spent on the wrong aspects in our industry. On one side we have what I lovingly call the 'carnival of the clueless' who either churn out products or help others churn out products that have no sustainable long-term value, while on the other we have the parade of the naysayers, which I've often been a part of.
That status-quo needs to change. Why? Because of the simple reason that the Indian digital opportunity does exist. Telecom has already demonstrated that. What needs to change is the 'how' aspect of how we unlock it. As mentioned earlier, the two aspects where a lot of energy is spent in our industry won't bring about that change.
So, how can we go about it?
- Be constructive: There is just way too much of criticism and hype in the industry. Companies love to talk up their products and the other end of the spectrum loves to talk it down. Between the two points, we are making little progress in going forward. All we are do is to argue endlessly and do little more than that.
- Less talk, more action: The ecosystem is full of people just talking about how the various aspects of starting up than actually doing any starting up. Most of the industry events have people who have done well on the one side and the wannabes who are agape, intellectually and orally, at being in such close proximity to the former. There is little enablement that happens at these events. You come, group-hug and leave.
- Share, reach out, teach: Making a venture work in India requires you to tackle a multitude of things that you would not probably have to deal with otherwise. There is a lot of learning out there which can help others starting out, locked away in companies. We really don't have a culture of sharing knowledge or information. We'd rather kick down a brother than help him out. Competitive edge is not always about holding back information.
- Reduce cognitive dissonance: A lot of products launched through the 2006-2008 period in online in India has little rationale or practical use case. Truckloads of money has gone down the drain launching these products that have little backing them other than the 'strong belief' of the managements and VCs that it will do well. We have to stop doing this. 90% of doing a business is pure common sense — of how much you make back on every dollar you put into a venture.
Can we please stop the guesswork and make reasonable assumptions made on what is known in numbers than go with the mutual suck-up games played in board rooms as the only rationale?
- Kill the inbreeding of ideas: There are a million good ideas out there in the non-online world that are begging for an online solution in India. We can't seem to think beyond the five pet themes (and their variants) in our industry at any given point in time.
- Honest measurement and instrumentation: Let us stop the inflation of numbers across the board. The industry lies through its teeth, starting from user engagement to inventory figures by the sales teams. This does get your balance sheet to look great in the shorter term, but it harms companies and the industry as a whole in the long run. We already see this in action where every study mentions numbers that will double or triple in the coming years, but, internally, every product hits a glass ceiling at sooner than later.
Of course, I do have an agenda in doing this and I will be quite upfront about it. After being somewhat of a free agent in the past year, I'm about to kick things up a notch with what is being attempted with Frontiernxt. I do believe that we can unlock the potential in the Indian digital space without burning a crore in SEM budgets every month. I do believe that the unlocking won't happen with a massive frontal assault on the news pages and psyche of the nation. We need to build bottom-up, in a federated manner. We need to have an eye on the marco aspect, while understanding and working closely at the micro level. And most importantly, none of us can do this alone. It is a big opportunity that requires buy-ins from various players.
The good news is that in terms of capital requirements, the Indian online opportunity still has a pretty low entry level. Most of what is done on in.com, can be replicated at a fraction of the cost now (well, spare the domain name and the expensive music licensing that does little more than bleed cash). Most of any other leading internet property in India has done can be replicated on the cheap. But, cost of replication has never been an issue. It is cost of adoption and the quality of adoption that has been the key on the internet. And the even greater news is that worthwhile adoption is not something that money can buy, which is exactly why none of the existing players have cracked it so far. You can't make things work on the internet by throwing more money at it.
But, I digress.
For modest sums, we can build smaller products that focus more on engaging 10 new good users in a day than 10,000 hit-and-run users. For this to be possible, you need genuinely good content or(and) genuinely good services. What we often to forget is that the medium (the internet) is just a conduit or tool to meet other ends and there are numerous such ends that need to be met out there. Just “being online” does not construe a business model.
What we need to do is to slowly turn the ecosystem around to allow for these ends to be enabled online. This does require thinking, measurement and products that are different from what we have seen till date. It probably won't be glamourous as the online we know of now, but it is something that I am going to bet really heavily on.
Read MoreWhat Is Wrong With Yahoo! Wanting You To Hug Yourself?
The full page advertising blitzkrieg launched by Yahoo! India on Monday was wrong on so many different levels that I am tempted to strike out everything that I had previously said about the company here. Then again, Yahoo! India has been a different beast from its parent division, lacking in consistency, direction and focus, with the only common thread being the manner in which both have wasted away the tremendous head start they have previously had in the space.
For starters, the idea of white text on contrasting backgrounds of bright yellow and black makes reading really difficult. The 'YOURS' in Yahoo!'s purple only serves to take the confusion to a totally different level. It is quite strange that even an agency like O&M would make a glaring error like that. Maybe there is some subliminal messaging in the text when it is overlaid over such backgrounds, but if there is one in it, it has totally missed me.
Secondly, the picture of a girl hugging herself has no connection with the text – “The internet is under a new management. YOURS.” How is a girl hugging herself the representation of being in charge? Being in charge often requires secondary subjects to be in the picture to establish and project that connection as a contrast. Being on your own, hugging yourself is the best way to say you are alone and on your own. It goes much better with Nobody wants me, I'm nobody's child.
Thirdly, the cocky text will make no sense to most users. How many of you wanted to be the internet's manager? What exactly is managing the internet anyway? I think the idea is to put across the message that Yahoo! is the gateway to the internet and by allowing you to put widgets on the home page somehow they are allowing you to be in control. To be fair, this was not something thought up by Yahoo! India, but by Bartz and Co in Sunnyvale.
Lastly, why did Yahoo! not do the creative in local languages too? The English-speaking Indian internet users are very unlikely to switch over to check out the new Yahoo!. The company also has substantial local language offerings in India. Growth for the company is going to come largely from those demographics where the comfort level with English is not that great. Then again, as said before, Yahoo! India has not been exactly the brightest and best apple in the orchard here.
Read More