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 MoreGingerbread On The Samsung Galaxy GTi9000
I have been running the leaked early beta release of Gingerbread (Android 2.3.2, I9000XXJVE) on the Samsung Galaxy S for about a month now and I can tell you that it looks really really good. The build is very buggy, so I would advise anyone who is tempted to do the same to hold on till Samsung puts out an official stable release (it will also not play nice with your warranty should you chose to run it on your phone).
There is little by means of cosmetic changes that is noticeable to those who are not detail-oriented and it is largely consistent from the 2.2.1 days. The notifications pane gets a new coat of paint and new icons. The apps stack is a straight carryover from 2.2.x, though I guess they may change it by the time a stable release is out. Almost everything worked out of the box for me and installation was done using Odin, which is never a comfortable thing.
Before I flashed to this build, I was upgrading to the CM7 beta release for the SGS, but after I set up the phone it figured that it just would not get on the mobile network. CM7 was looking really good till that point. I will probably move to that once they put out a stable release.
The Gingerbread release by Samsung, though, fixes most of the bad issues of previous releases of Android on the Galaxy S. The boot process is really really fast, unlike previous releases where you had to wait forever to get the phone booted into an usable state. The fact that I have not rooted it or applied any lag-fixes on it should tell you how good it is. Neither Eclair or Froyo have run unrooted/non-lag fixed on my phone for long since the experience used to be that bad. If they can close out the nasty bugs, Samsung may have a winner on their hands with this.
Since it is a beta, as mentioned earlier, the OS is still buggy in places. It can freeze up and a few reboots are the norm in a day. For me, that is worth living with since none of the cooked ROMs have given the kind of battery life this buggy release has given me. I have tried it in various combinations with wifi, GPS, data and it has consistently outperformed anything else I have run on this phone.
It will be really interesting if the guys at Cyanogen can fix up CM7 for the Galaxy S in time for Samsung's official release of Gingerbread. In either case, it is going to be finally happy times for SGS owners – another couple of months and the phone, which is an excellent hardware package, should get the kind of software it truly deserves, making it a really good iPhone competitor at a significantly cheaper price point.
Read MoreWhat Ails Broadband In India
Every year we are presented with a rosy picture of how the internet will explode in India in terms of growth and usage. Even though this scenario has remained unchanged from the times of bubble 1.0, active users in India has never gone over 100 million by even the most liberal of estimates. In the years since 2005 this story changed to hang all its hopes on 3G as the one-stop-solution to all the penetration woes. While the 3G auctions may have made the government's books look a lot nicer, it has done little to further the cause of truly empowering India on the digital front. Meanwhile, with 3G pricing showing little recognition of market realities, the new saviour in town has switched to LTE. I won't hold my breath for that one to work either.
So what really ails broadband in India? I have looked previously at the product aspect of the issue, so I won't go over it again. In this post I will cover policy and pricing instead.
Policy: For a nation that can benefit hugely from a well-connected population, we have policy and governance that does little to foster it. The astronomical rates at which 3G auctions have gone will ensure that telcos have little inclination or incentive to price their 3G offerings at a reasonable rate. Even though there are plans that are as cheap as Rs 99 per month, they have such low usage caps that with any real-world usage, users will wind up paying many times more that amount.
We need to remember that the current environment is one where the bulk of customers are generating less than Rs 300 in ARPU. These are the people who make up the majority of the market and expecting them to pay even Rs 100 on a whim on data is being ridiculous. So you can imagine what a non-starter the severely capped/priced plans are going to be. For the larger market to use digital services liberally, the pricing needs to be much more realistic. Yes, the regular users are using the internet more these days, but we need more non-regular users to be online.
Internet in India has the potential to be transformational beyond belief. We have made positive strides in e-governance and digitizing parts of the government machinery, but the government needs to do more to provide the platform on which a vast majority of our can access information, education and services. The current levels at which the services are priced, they don't ensure either unfettered use or they wind up being unaffordable.
Pricing: There is considerable pressure on margins for telcos from voice. Since voice APRU is not exactly shooting through the roof and VAS having now gone past its glory days the squeeze is truly on in data ARPU. Even in 2009, the ARPU for data on Airtel was $13-$14, which even by today's standards is considerably higher than what most telcos earn on voice. In 2009, you could easily find more than a handful of plans priced under Rs 1000 per month.
By Airtel's own admission its current popular plans are Rs 1299 and Rs 699 per month. By 2009 the company had completed work to make its network 100% ADSL2, which meant that any further increase in infrastructure cost would have been because of the upgrading their network to VDSL2 in select areas. The other cost component, backhaul, does not seem to be a major problem since they were easily allowing 100GB caps on lower end connections earlier, which they are now scaling down to 20GB – 50GB, depending on the plan you are on. Moreover, the network has inbuilt capacity to support IPTV, which requires about 8Mbit of sustained connectivity. So, the story of network capacity being a bottleneck does not hold too much of water.
Looking at the figures, it is easy to understand why the company is going hammer and tongs and after getting more margins out of users. It is easier to get a data user to shell out an extra Rs 500 per month than to get a voice user to do the same. This, though, is an awful thing since it is now leading to a situation where due a lack of transparency and bad pricing usage will go down in the longer term as users are forced to shell out more for less.
Looking at Wimax, which is the only realistic option that can get the internet to areas beyond the big cities, the situation is no better. You will rarely find plans here that cost less than Rs 1000 per month. In economic classes where the spends between all family members combined on voice is less than Rs 1000, how can you expect them to shell out Rs 1000 for data alone, especially when there is a lack of compelling applications to even get them started in the first place?
Conclusion: The big Indian digital story requires us to get most of the population hooked up to the internet. Right now, at even moderate usage levels, that will cost at least Rs 700 per family. This is unrealistic and the root cause of why the proclamations of 'the year of internet' in India has never come true. At this point in time neither the telcos are willing to help the situation alter its course by introducing pricing conclusive to growth and usage nor is the government doing anything to ensure that they have every incentive to do something like that.
Read MoreMetrics To Track In Online Operations
This is not really proper post, it is a collection of points I have repeated to many people (last posted in a Hacker News thread). Figured it would be a good idea to have it put up somewhere.
What it is a list of metrics you need to track when you run an online operation and the importance of each element:
The metrics
1. Page views: Track overall growth
2. Page views per user: Track engagement
3. Visits: Track overall growth.
4. Unique visitors: largely useless metric since every tool out there disagrees with each other on the number.
5. Revenue per user: Track user segmentation.
6. Revenue per page view: Track infrastructure costs.
7. Active users: Finer measure of engagement and churn.
8. User acquisition/retention cost: Track cost of marketing/outreach.
9. Conversions: Free to registered, registered to paid.
10. Off-site: Notification emails, Newsletter subscribers, open rates, Twitter followers, Facebook fans.
Their importance
(1) Important for selling inventory on CPM.
(2) Needed to get the mix of organic growth with existing users to increase, while keeping a different focus on acquiring new users.
(3) Needed for the ad sales pitch. No point getting a million visitors if you can't retain them, but sales needs inventory.
(4) This has always been ~10% off between different tools. Can be an indicative measure of engagement.
(5) Helps keep ceilings in place for acceptable cost per user.
(6) Helps make decisions on infrastructure where you need more than what you can buy.
(7) Possibly the only user-related metric that should matter internally.
(8) Can help you understand why bidding on that $5 CPC keyword does not make sense when what you make per user is $3.
(9) Helps you fine tune monetization.
(10) Helps you cover all other external delivery platforms.
Read MoreAn Old Gem: The Opportunity For An Online News Operation In India
Strangely, most of the points are still quite valid and the opportunities have remained unaddressed.
Read MoreElgg, Buddypress, Drupal: Different Flavours for Different Reasons
One question that I repeatedly get to hear from users and clients trying to set up private social networks is the 'which' part of it. This post is meant to act as a very lightweight guide for that process. We will consider only Elgg, Buddypress and Drupal for this. There are numerous other options available like Dolphin, Ning and Jomsocial, but Ning falls out of the list due to it being a hosted solution and I have little experience with Ning and Dolphin in their current iterations.
The crucial question in selecting one of the many options is whether you know what you actually want? The effectiveness of the solution used can vary wildly depending on how clear you are about what you really want. Some of the solutions are pretty close to plug-and-play. Install them, fill in some data and you are good to go. The others are barebones frameworks, they need a lot of work to be made into a product. Clients also often make the grave error of underestimating the management overheads of running a full fledged social network. Between the technology, product and administration tasks it can easily wind up taking up a lot of your time (and often money too).
Social network frameworks also require much higher specification infrastructure to support it. While you can keep a blog going on a $3-per month shared hosting solution, most of these social networking products will start to become unusable on shared hosting as your user base and concurrent usage starts to climb. In such a scenario, it may be the best idea to go with a Ning or the commercial offering of Elgg, so that you are shielded from the technology parts of the puzzle.
A quick checklist of things that will make your choices easier would run like this:
1. How many users are you looking to support
2. Will it be only free users or paid users or a mix of paid and free?
3. How comfortable are you with managing technology (both coding and infrastructure)
4. Minimum budget
5. Time that you are willing to spend on it
6. What degree of support are you willing to provide users?
Most of the private social networks can be split into three kinds:
1. Solely for communication: You want only the ability for members to sign up and communicate with each other in common threads.
2. Full featured: You want a clone of the features of the bigger networks.
3. Full featured and heavily customized: You want a clone of the bigger networks and also a lot of custom features added on.
In the case of (1), you can easily make do with a Google Groups set up or something similar to that. Anything else is really an overhead that you get little value from. For (2), go with one of the commercial offerings and you will get the best of both worlds. (3) is where most of my work has been and in and thus the longer elaboration on the point.
In using a customized solution you are making a substantial commitment to a platform from which switching won't be easy or cheap. Each platform has its own strengths and weaknesses, but one thing that is common among all of them is that after a point in the growth curve you have to constantly reevaluate problems you had fixed earlier. A simple example is of a feature that lists all users in a single page. This may work flawlessly when you have hundreds of users, but it will get your site to a crawl when you move into the thousands.
The three solutions under the scanner here – Elgg, Buddypress and Drupal – all take different approaches to producing an outcome largely owing to their respective lineages.
Elgg is a social framework that has a few modules in its out-of-the-box form which enables it to work as a bare-bones product.
Buddypress is based on WordPress and it is now a full fledged plugin on the WordPress platform which is a content publishing engine.
Drupal is a content management framework which has nothing social in it out-of-the-box. It takes a lot of work to get it to be a social networking site. You can read the guide to it here.
The three solutions can be further evaluated under the following heads:
Ease of use (users): Buddypress is the easiest of the three to use since the base framework it uses is WordPress. Elgg comes in second, while Drupal is the hardest to figure out.
Ease of use (site administrators): Buddypress is the easiest again due to the WordPress lineage. Drupal comes second becomes of its superior update notifications and built-in tools to atomically manage users and permissions. Elgg finishes third because of its really clunky administration interface.
Development: Elgg comes in first here because of its origin as a social networking engine. It also has code that is targeted only at PHP5, which means that it carries little bloat from the PHP4 days. It also has the best API of the lot and a well executed views system. Buddypress comes in second because of the simplicity of the WordPress API, but it can quickly become a major limitation if your requirements start of exceed what is provided out-of-the-box by it. Drupal suffers because most of the heavy lifting for the 'socialization' of the platform depends on various modules. Customizing these can often be quite complicated.
Platform Maturity: At the core Elgg is the youngest of the three, but it comes up on top again. It is a very well designed and executed platform at its core and its entities system is built to scale well if you can throw the right amount of hardware at it. Drupal comes in second because of the solid core it has been built on top of. Buddypress comes in third because of the core WordPress engine, which is still only a publishing engine and not really a framework.
Flexibility: Drupal comes right on top here because of the dazzling array of modules that it can leverage. There is a module for almost everything you can think of in Drupal. While it is a different matter that it can be a nightmare to integrate them all in a logical manner, the fact is that Drupal does give you the option to pull it off. Elgg comes in second with its well-designed API that allows you to extend it quite well and without too much trouble. Buddypress will be last here because it is tough to get it to do anything that is not there at the core.
It is most tempting to tally these scores and proclaim a winner based on my experiences, but I won't do that since every social network has requirements that are unique to itself. This is meant more as a guide to help you along the way of making better informed decisions regarding your platform choices.
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