The Elevator Pitch

Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Is there enough space for another player in the online news segment?

Well, YES!

Why?

• Nobody does it right - still a mix of old school and wannabe new school

• People have engaged users recently, but the user is not at the center of the news universe

• Letting users light candles online is a joke and not genuine tv2web or web2tv interaction

• Whither regional language content?

Let us talk numbers

• Current daily internet users estimated at a million per day (source IAMAI)

• The market leaders (Ndtv.com and Ibnlive.com) flatten out at close to a million page views and 100k users in a day.

• Even if you take 50% of the user base as English speaking, there is still almost another 4/5th of the market we are yet to reach

• Advertising revenue is roughly a crore per quarter, with unintelligent and non-targeted advertising

• CNN-IBN shows over 2 million stories every month, at an average of 3 minutes per story, that in itself is around 100,000 hours of video that is being watched every month

• This does not include live streaming

• This is a number that will continue to grow

Can a new product be differentiated from the existing players?

Well, again, YES!

But, how?

• Be Interesting

• Use self-identifying data: Every story has to be categorized and organised in a multitude of ways (by topic, by category, by location)

• Let users generate context: Allow stories to be tagged, organised and collected according to what the user's needs. Let your view not be the only view

• Localize: Map the channel's focus geographies through IP addresses to content to display and push up local information

• Let the context follow you: Allow snapshots of content relevant to a user to be shown via multiple modes: email, SMS, RSS etc

• Value addition: Allow contextual linkages by signing up content partners

How to go about it?

1. Get data organisation right

2. Build, buy and collaborate intelligently

3. Have a pyramid-like structure than a rectangular one for the product

4. Integrate workflows intelligently

5. Syndicate intelligently

A rough roadmap

1. Initial wireframe and design

2. Design and deploy backend systems

3. Content acquisition and delivery tie ups (for mobile, hosting, videos)

4. Dry runs

5. Version one launch

6. Back to the drawing board for launch of version two

Will it cost me the earth, heaven and everything in between?

NO!

With intelligent spending, you can even start turning in profits by end of the second operational quarter.

Caveats

1. News websites typically take around a year to attain escape velocity in terms of audience and reach

2. First year is typically a lot of hard work, with disproportional results

3. The online news space is evolving rapidly. Expect others to copy your best ideas and make hay in the short run

4. Serving video, static and streaming costs a lot of money. No existing player has successfully monetized it yet

Thank you!

Any questions?