FirstPost.com: Will It Work?
It won’t.
Before I get into the economics of it, let me first tackle the concept. Going by Raghav Bahal’s introduction:
Today, news is a hyper-active, multi-point phenomenon, with you at its epicentre. You read, write, bounce, redirect, navigate, pick, choose, reject, reinforce, tweet, facebook and firstpost it … Yes, you Firstpost it.
I am not sure what exactly does that mean beyond previous attempts at a forced transformation to a verb like “blishing it”. Ironically, in all the activities mentioned in the quote, “firstpost it” is the odd man out. You don’t need FirstPost.com to do any other activities mentioned in that sentence. The introductory post aside, the concept seems to be built along the lines of early days of The Huffington Post (the current avtaar is a totally different story from what it was like when it was launched).
Huffpo was reportedly set to make a profit in 2009, ‘nearing‘ its first annual profit (no numbers disclosed) by the end of 2010 and was not “rushing to be bought” only months before they were acquired by AOL in March, 2011. The company took $37 million in venture funding pre-AOL and had done $30 million in revenue in 2010. There is no available estimate of how much it costs to keep the operation going, but it is reasonable to expect that the number is non-trivial. It is an interesting model, but not a new one. You can always get traffic on the internet by throwing money at it, but it does not scale (well, other than the exception of Demand Media and they work on a different model altogether).
Let us tackle the numbers. Huffpo does an estimated 23 million uniques (figures from Compete and a guesstimated correction based on an earlier gap between internal and estimated numbers) in a month. On a comparative note, Facebook had an estimated 21 million uniques from India in 2010. As you can see, even with money thrown at it, similar scale will evade a product like FirstPost.com in India. The publication has nine employees on its editorial rolls. Other functions, I would assume, are handled by shared resources with the parent division.
My guesstimate puts the payroll for full-time employees at around Rs 1 crore annually. Distribution costs should be a tiny blip on the general Network18 infrastructure. They are running an out-of-home campaign supporting the product, but I don’t have an estimation on the costs and it could also be a barter or a non-cash deal like how the network sites were running an interstitial yesterday. If you factor in a variety of miscellaneous costs, I would think they would have to do at least Rs 1.5 crore in its first year of operations to reach break even.
Assuming the very unlikely situation of the product being able to sustain about 10 million page views in a month, at an average of four ad impressions per page view and Rs. 200 CPM, we still don’t cross Rs 1 crore in revenue. It is possible to run campaigns based on spots and innovations, but the revenues would be lower too in line with that. Needless to say, even at reasonable scale, they will struggle to make ends meet.
The problem is that scale is impossible in the domain once you stop massive SEM spends and leveraging network traffic. Mind you, I like the product. I have been looking forward to a content product from India that is produced and written well and tackles the topics that I am likely to follow. But, at the same time, I am also aware of the fact that an audience that comprises people like me is very much a niche. If we truly value products like these, we should also be willing to bear at least a part of the costs involved in putting it online.
FirstPost.com by no means is not the first attempt at such a product. The first version of Tehelka.com and the long-dead The Newspaper Today had attempted the same – trying to bring out a web-only well-produced publication. Even though FirstPost.com seems to be spending much less than what it had cost either Tehelka.com or TNT to get going, I am afraid the market dynamics have not changed much since then and it will suffer a fate that is not considerably different from them and unfortunately for FirstPost.com a Huffpo-esque escape into the arms of an AOL is not an option to them.
Disclosure: I have been previously employed by Network18, Tehelka and The India Today Group Online at different times in my career.
Read MoreQuick Note On The Unholy Media-Business Connection
Much of what has been reported has not come as a surprise for most who have been on the inside. I saw a lot of this first-hand in 2002, when I was still part of the editorial set up, and could never really figure out how to make my peace with it. Somehow you are made to understand that this is how things are, get on with it. Why I finally left the editorial side of things about a year or so after that had a lot more to do with the fact that I just was not cut out for being a journalist. I did not have the persistence, patience or the thick skin required for it. Nor could I figure out the incredibly petty politics and other weirdness that accompanied it. Believe it or not, the business/operations side of it was much better compared to the editorial.
I was reading Indrajit Gupta's piece on the whole mess and was quite amused. He mentions how young journalists, who are not as well trained/mentored as an older generation used to be, are easily swayed by the temptations of planted information and leaks. The nice sleight of hand he pulls off in the argument is to absolve the senior journalists (most of those who are on the tapes could not have been called either “young” or “junior” in the past decade) and let it all rest on the kids who are not trained well enough. True, there is an issue with the quality of the younger professionals these days, but they did not cause this and the senior ones are the gatekeepers. The buck stops there.
The extent of all this is much beyond what is spoken or written about. PR companies have extensive profiles of both publications and their employees. It is well tracked, catalogued and often profiled to the extent of how should a story be pitched to you if you are working a beat that their client has interests in. That you are getting played is often a fact that you are not aware of even when you strongly believe you are not getting played. Fancy junkets and deep throats have long been a part of the industry, I am yet to come across any journalist who says “no” to either or both. If you work the beat, you always have to work your sources, it is just that the information is a lot more valuable these days, heavily incentivizing the plants. Consequently, it needs a lot more of vetting and scrutiny. But who has the time for all of that?
Read MoreMedia, New and Old Are Getting Played And How
We are at a very interesting stage in the way content is produced and distributed in our lives and two recent developments serve to demonstrate the challenges that are coming our way.
The first is the Apple iPad
The fact that it is not available in the market as yet has not stopped every self-styled pundit from predicting whether your mom (or grandmom) will line up to buy it and change the fate of the world, or if it will bomb.
In the months before the launch announcement, the degree of speculation regarding the device reached heights unseen before, all based on guesswork and 'informed' deep-throats. Now that it has been announced, the race is on to predict whether the world will end or if it will be rescued because of it. The fact is that nobody knows how it will do in the future, not even Apple, for that matter.
Both media and the blogging/tweeting brigade loves a sensational headline and the iPad is now an excellent muse for that.
The second development is Hiphop, which is Facebook's PHP-to-C++ convertor/compiler.
When the news first filtered out that Facebook was up to something that had to do with the guts of PHP, it caught on pretty fast. The story ran with the implied notion that Facebook was developing a new PHP runtime of its own because normal PHP was getting to be too slow for it.
This was tweeted and written about in a lot of publications, citing the original post as the only source. The original post itself was largely speculative and had zero comments from anyone who could be qualified enough on the situation.
Speculation, guesswork etc are are fine within the realm of publishing content, especially news content. The problem kicks in where nobody bothers to correct these wrong assumptions once, they have been found to be wrong.
Since that time, Facebook publicly unveiled the project which turned out to be anything but a new runtime. The project – HipHop – converts PHP code into C++ and allows you to run it as a compiled binary. Nothing outstanding or exceptional about it. But the merit of the project itself is not the issue here.
The problem is when people who write about these things don't do their homework, nor won't they update previously published erroneous stories. Case in point is the RWW story: Facebook Rewrites PHP Runtime With HipHop. The post even has a comment by David Recordon, who is both a Facebook employee and a noted geek saying the story is wrong. The author responds to the comment, but the story stands uncorrected.
What is common in both the cases is how well both bloggers and media are getting played these days. Yes, the whole PR/Media loop is a bit of a game of cat-and-mouse and on an average the good and the bad tends to balance each other out, but that is no longer the case anymore.
Companies are now using the desperate need for journalists to brand everything as a 'killer-this' or a 'flop' that they are playing them more than ever before. Even with the bloggers they are now extending the concept of exclusive previews. Look at the case of both the the Nexus One. Some of the prominent bloggers were given units to play around with, but it was under an embargo/NDA. This has an interesting side-effect of effectively silencing a bunch of thought leaders while leaving the floor open for rank speculation and calculated leaks and it worked extremely well for Google. For a me-too Android phone, it got excellent coverage and Google could really control the message too very well.
In the case of Facebook's HipHop, the company seems to have gained enough mileage from the launch, but what remains now as urban legend is that the PHP runtime is not 'fast enough'. This, when tweeted and retweeted by people who don't even understand what is being talked about, slowly gets into the public's psyche, eventually trickling down into purchasing and platform decisions.
Looking at the information landscape these days, it is a worrying picture that I get to see. There are near-zero sources of information that are either accurate or objective or both. Yes, we all love to be read more and as firms we would love to have our products sell well, but there has to be limits to all of these things. There is little wonder that I don't miss reading much news as it breaks these days. The real flavour of it comes to the surface a few days down the line.
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 MoreTwitter Guidelines For Media Professionals And Organizations
It is not uncommon in the world of blogs and micro-blogging to bash media professionals for their lack of involvement in those spheres or the way they choose to get involved in them. I have been lucky enough in my professional life to see both sides of the divide (as a blogger, Twitter-user and as someone who worked for close to a decade in digital media) and I believe that sometimes the problem really is that there is no simple, easy-to-understand explanation of how things work out there. So, this is an attempt at that.
Even though, the following has been written mostly about Twitter, it can also apply for blogs and other publishing platforms that allow media professionals to post content that is often published without going through the usual formal editorial checks and balances. The following are a couple of guidelines that should, hopefully, help media tackle Twitter in a better manner.
It is not a Unicast medium
In any form of traditional media — print, television, internet — the flow of information is overwhelmingly unidirectional. The journalists and the organizations they work for are the content producers, while the audience are the consumers. It is never an even playing field. In the sense that the producers/publishers are on a higher platform than the audience. Blogs and Twitter differ on that front by getting everyone on the same platform and tooling.
The immediate ramification of this is that the journalists have to cede control of the distribution. Being who you are will certainly make the visibility criterion an easier deal for famous media professionals, but if you use it only to preach from the pulpit, the audience will move away from you in a flash. Platforms like Twitter and content aggregators, first up, strips content producers of the protection that branding traditionally grants them. For professionals who have always lived behind that, it can be a disconcerting/disorienting feeling to be out there on their own. Welcome to the new world.
Engage, Engage, Engage
The first step top stop being an unicaster is to get a decent Twitter client, so that you can engage the audience better. Twitter clients are to tweeting what Microsoft Outlook/Outlook Express is to email. Twitter's web site makes it quite hard to interact with the audience, especially for a new user. Using a Twitter client helps you work around that problem (here is a list of such applications. If you are behind a corporate firewall or if you are restricted by a lack of privileges on your system, use the ones that are marked 'website').
The difference for media, between a unicast Twitter account (@prabhuchawla: 2390 followers) and an account that is genuinely interactive (@virsanghvi: 26,161 followers) can be substantial. You will be surprised at the amount you can learn just by interacting to people.
For the more adventurous, consider this as the difference between singing in front of a thirty thousand-strong crowd from the safe confines of the stage and stage diving into them. The latter is grimy, more dangerous by many degrees, unscripted and uncontrolled, but the rush is also like nothing else. After all, a passionate audience is something that every content producer loves to have with them.
But do keep in mind that being active on Twitter can eat up a lot of time. An example of this is DNA India's Twitter account. When they started on Twitter DNA was manned by a real human being who used to post snippets of news with no links on Twitter. While it is not clear when the switch happened, of late, the only entries in the account now are automated posts from the site's RSS feed. Since measurement of the RoI on activities like tweeting is still a work in progress, the sweet spot for engagement will also differ from organization to organization.
There will be blood
And there will be plenty of it. Being on the same platform with millions of users also gives you a real-time feel of the reactions. The feedback — being instantaneous, unscripted, unedited, unmoderated — can be overwhelming in both the positive and the negative, which is a far cry from the normal sanitized version of the same within the traditional media confines. You will experience name-calling, a lot of angst, rank abuse and many other negatives.
Be clear about disengaging with the bad as much as you are clear about engaging with the good. The easily-offended minority with a very loud voice has always been the bane of the internet. You will find the same lot here too. Engage them at your own peril. But don't let the noisy few stop you from engaging the quieter majority.
Have clear guidelines
This one applies more for organizations than individuals. Since tweets essentially are messages in the public domain it is a good idea to have a clear policy about what can be said and what cannot be said. Organizations need to clearly spell out which accounts are representative of the company and which are the ones that belongs to individuals.
It does not augur well with a desire for completely free-flowing conversation to have such restrictions in place, but the odd lawsuit or two regarding something that was said on Twitter will increasingly become more common in the coming days. It is much better to be safe than sorry on that front.
Verification & Classification
Twitter accounts from media fall into three kinds: individuals, automated feeds and content-specific (examples in the links). Specifying what kind of account it is also sets the expectations right for the audience. It would be a good idea for organizations to list in a single location the names of the employees who use Twitter and also the other automated and content-specific feeds. This gives a degree of legitimacy for the accounts and also allows the individuals to clearly specify the degree of association they want to have with the brand/employer in their usage of Twitter.
There is also the option of going for a verified account with Twitter. According to the Twitter, the feature is still in limited testing, but it will be a good idea to give it a shot. If that does not work, you can always use listings on your own site to work around it for the time being.
Track key metrics
It is important for organizations to track the ROI from activities like being on Twitter. A basic list of parameters to track would include follower count, replies, ReTweets, and click-throughs on automated feeds. This will go a long way in determining the degree of engagement that is right for the results you desire. Doing it yourself can be a chore as it is often quite tough to get consolidated referrer information from click-throughs that originate from Twitter clients. In that case, you can always outsource it to an agency or specialized sites that do this for you, for a small fee.
To be very honest, I am not sure whether two-years down the line Twitter would be the big thing that it is right now. But the moot point is that regardless of what happens with Twitter, muti-point, limited-branding distribution is going to be a significant part of distributing content in days to come. For media, it is important to adapt to such new features and use the same principles to approach them.
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