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 MoreAbuse Of Discourse And Communication
In the 1990s, as an adolescent, in the small town that I grew up in, there was not much to hold my attention or answer a million questions I had about everything. When I was not making barely serious enough attempts to stay out of trouble, I would be reading anything and everything I could lay my hands on at the local British Council Library. There were not many shelves in the library that did not receive my attention, even on topics that I could understand little of. And my first memorable interaction with a computer was with the terminal attached to their cataloguing system.
It was around the same time that I first started hearing about the internet and a fancy bit of technology that enabled users to browse virtual worlds. Clubbing those with my favourite distraction I came up with a naive vision of the future where I could go 'vitually' to any library I wanted in the world and read all that I could. Few years later, I was introduced to dial-up internet, Netscape Navigator became a familiar bit of software, VRML failed to live up to its promise, the virtual libraries never manifested, but I found another universe of learning online.
I owe a lot of what I have and what I know to a lot of people. Most of them faceless and represented by walls of text posted online. I do believe that we significantly underestimate the impact the internet has had on humanity in allowing people the freedom to express themselves. Publishing your thoughts to an audience is a concept that is innate to us digital natives. It may even become the most-used form of communication for the generations that are to come, but we should ignore, at our own peril, how we got here.
Looking back in history, the same act of publishing was not available to everyone. Even before the advent of printing, the written word and knowledge was the domain of a select few and knowledge was hoarded and kept away from the masses. Even after Gutenberg's game changing contribution in the form of the printing press, being able to express freely was not an option available to most for centuries to come.
In essence, what we take for granted today is something over which many have been persecuted and killed.
It is easy to overlook all of this when you post a blog, tweet about something or post a comment on one of million websites on the internet. We tend to forget that what we enjoy today is a privilege that most of humanity did not enjoy for many hundreds of years. It is a privilege that a vast percentage of humanity won't enjoy for many decades to come still.
In saying what we normally say and write online, we often forget that essential, yet hard-to-find, quality of humility. We don't have to write tomes expressing something deep, technical and complicated to make it worthwhile. We just have to remember in the bits and bytes we contribute, we are in real-time leaving behind a legacy that will be looked up by generations to come.
The internet of today has swelled not only in terms of the consumers, but also in terms of the producers of content. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in an increased degree of intolerance and a disposition towards outshouting each other. To be online today is to be put through a wave of half-truths, misrepresentations and spite to a great extent. In opening up the tools to publish one's self to a much wider audience, we have allowed the immediacy and reach to mesmerize us than the be influenced most by the value of what we have to say.
I find it very saddening that such a powerful tool is now used in ways that spread so much misinformation and spite. I guess a little more of consideration, a little less of aggression and a whole lot more of helpfulness can't be too much ask?
Read MoreA Social Reboot
When I got off Twitter (I do log in there every now and then) and disabled my Facebook account, it was not meant to be a permanent thing. I had a massive backlog to run through when December 2010 came around and cutting off these two were one of the many steps I had taken to ensure that I don't lose focus. It is now close to two months since I have posted anything on Twitter and almost a month since I disabled my Facebook account. Surprisingly, I don't miss either all that much.
Before I go any further, I should clarify that some of my observations regarding usage of these platforms are very specific to me. It may or may not apply to you (chances being more of the latter). I have also been off instant messengers (with the exception of Skype for work) since 2008, making me very old school. Email and phone have been the best ways to reach me for a while now.
Usage
Twitter: My typical use of Twitter has been a 60:40 split between sourcing information/links and conversations. I don't follow a lot of people and have always tried to keep the number under 100 since anytime it has gone above 90 the noise just completely overwhelms the signal for me. I also don't have the bandwidth to handle any volume greater than that. But I do reply to pretty much every tweet that addresses me (well, save some of the endlessly repetitive #ff tweets).
Facebook: I am most certainly the 20 in the 80:20 creation:consumption ratio on Facebook. I rarely post anything there, but browse a lot, 'like' the odd artifact or two and keep up on what friends are telling others what they are up to these days. Facebook used to be the third persistent tab on my browser (the first two being Gmail and Google Reader), though I could rarely understand why. Guess it was more of a habit – command+3, command-r.
Value
Twitter: To say I have been completely off Twitter would not be true. Other than regular lurking sessions, there is an experimental site that I run (now very broken), which picks up the links from my Twitter timeline, crawls the links, excludes some that I don't like (Techcrunch, Foursquare) and throws a RSS feed at me that I follow in Google Reader. The value I have gotten from Twitter as an interest-driven content source has been excellent. It augments my Google Reader subscriptions well. Only if I could de-duplicate, cluster and classify all these sources into a single feed..
How much do I miss Twitter? On a scale of 1-5, I think a 3 is an ideal representation of this. It could have been higher, but over time I started having fewer conversations that were more than just chatter and I was getting more into broadcast-only mode. Yes, I could prune and change my follow list to address it, but I don't have the inclination to do that. And Twitter does not help matters much by having a horribly broken discovery mechanism. The 'similar people' feature is a joke.
Facebook: If one word could sum up my usage of Facebook it would be 'timesink'. Facebook is almost entirely personal contacts for me, so there is little professional value for me from it. The third tab has been my favourite source of distractions and as a product Facebook excels at that. My real value from Facebook has been birthdays. I am awful at remembering these things and in the previous layout of Facebook it was easy to see them. The day they changed it, one of my major reasons to use Facebook also disappeared.
How much do I miss Facebook? On a scale of 1-5, it is probably zero. The first few days I had to fight the habit of opening the third tab and key in 'f' and wait for auto-complete to do the rest of the magic. After a week or so, I did not even remember the reasons as to why I was there in the first place. I do like having more time on my hands to read things I like (books, for instance) and not hang out on the computer blindly clicking away at links.
This, by no means, is not representative of most people I know. It is actually representative of the problems I have. I have a personality that is very prone to addictions like those. A normal addiction grants you something valuable – a rush, a fix etc – but for me most addictions just grant a pattern or a habit to break the monotony. It is what I call the anticipation rush – the rush that when the data loads on your system, you feel you'll find something exciting there. This dies as soon as the page load is over.
What Next?
I do spend a fair bit of time on Quora and Hacker News. I jump in on the odd thread where I feel I have something useful to contribute. They are not beyond the flaws mentioned about Facebook and Twitter earlier in the post, but they work much slower and there is an inbuilt incentive to not contribute in both places unless you have something of use/value to say. I have to admit, I quite like that.
At this stage, I don't see myself activating my Facebook account again. I simply don't see what do I stand to gain from it. Twitter – I may get back on it, but I want to try something else before I do that. Over time, I have been increasingly wary of not owning the content and conversations that I contribute. I don't want to own all of it, but I don't like this current situation where I don't own most of it. Also, I want to see if I can patch together some of these on this blog and my personal domain. Yes, I won't ever probably go viral (not like I ever have), but I kind of like that better.
A smaller audience, better quality conversations and ownership of the context/content – sounds like a workable plan to me.
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.
Read MoreGiving Back
This year I have supported three Open Source initiatives that I have probably used the most. Elgg, NeoOffice and Wikipedia have contributed greatly to my ability to earn a living, learn a lot more than what I would have otherwise ever known and build and express a lot of ideas and concepts. These are not major contributions and they have been made in a personal capacity, but I do intend to push it up a notch every year and once the company steadies itself I will institute a proper program that will identify more initiatives and contribute a lot more.
A lot of what we are able to do on the web these days is possible due to the work of a handful of people who have often worked for nothing in return. If some of the software that enables us were to be billed at the level that most shrink wrapped software is billed, the internet as we know it would not exist today. You can argue about the validity and feasibility of that model, but you can't argue that all of us have benefitted greatly from it. Even though most of the stalwarts who have put together these things have not demanded money as a must-have in return for what they have created, it is a good gesture to make any contribution that you can make.
If it is possible for you, do try to find one of those that you like and contribute in whatever capacity you can.
Read MorePersonal Context: The Next Frontier
One of the downsides of so many people publishing so much of content (Blogs, Twitter, Microblogs, Flickr etc) is that keeping your head above all the noise has become an impossible task. The situation is so bad that often times the only recourse available is to shut off most of these channels. And this is a problem that will only get worse as the number of people who can produce content online is only going to keep growing.
Most of our current filtering mechanisms like aggregators and ranking systems work by applying the preferences of the many to the individual. This does allow for a dynamic data set compared to the static ones if you were to use the individual's sources as the data set being operated up on. But it also results in the dilution of context, leading to massive generalization and approximation.
The main reason why personal context is a non-starter in most cases is cost. It is simply way too expensive to index and group content on a per-user basis. One way to work around this is to offload the processing and storage to the end user, like what Mailbrowser has done. I have been an advocate of a hybrid model based on this for a while, but, unfortunately, I don't have the technical chops or the required infrastructure to build it.
This method also goes very much against the “cloud” school of thought. So you can't expect any of the existing big players to make much inroads into using this approach. But I do believe that we are reaching the limits of what a generalized context can provide. If you sit out the noise for a week, you will realize that there is little that you have missed and that the ROI on processing information churned out by existing filters is near zero.
Read More