CyberMedia To Set Up Online Marketplaces Around Dare; Thoughts On Marketplaces

In a conversation with MediaNama today, Pradeep Gupta (PG), Chairman and MD of the CyberMedia Group said that there are two products that the company is developing around Dare, their entrepreneurship brand:

Business Exchange: The first marketplace will be a freelance exchange on the lines of Elance; “It was not initially in the plan,” said PG, “but this we’re building a sort of a digital marketplace, where people who are entrepreneurs and looking for certain services, and people who are providing those services can meet. For example, we did an article on outsourcing of marketing, and a number of people wrote in saying - ‘Hey, can you tell me a company who can take up my marketing. I’d like to outsource it.’ Similarly, there are companies who have written in saying they provide these services.”
Innovation Marketplace: Cybermedia will allow companies to offer a brief about their Intellectual Property, and allow buyers to license that IP.

The Business Exchange is expected to go live in Q3. I also asked PG about the revenue model for the markeplaces - he said they will charge a transaction fee for deals, much like other freelance marketplaces, though they’re yet to finalize the various payment slabs for different grades of accounts.

Marketplaces are far more efficient in connecting buyers and sellers:

Most marketplaces have targeted offshoring work - sites like ELance, Guru etc have a significant number Indian service providers; for a service provider, it’s a question of margins - where is he or she able to make more money for the same kind of work? Marketplaces also offer buyers and sellers transparent pricing, and a means for price discovery. Sellers are able to showcase their portfolio, and can be rated and reviewed by buyers. Payment is often controlled - via an Escrow account.

A buyer who lists a project adds money to the escrow account, which is released to the seller on project completion. This way, the seller is also guaranteed payment. Not all online marketplaces allow this facility, though. Some online marketplaces that have recently been launched in India:

Afaqs Freelance Exchange: Launched in March, the Afaqs Freelance Exchange connects companies with freelancers. Freelancers pay to host their portfolio - Rs. 600 per year for a Primary, Rs. 1200 for a Professional and a Rs. 2400 for a Firm account.
Pitchh.com Launched by BlogWorks, Pitchh connects organizations with agencies for advertising, public relations, marketing, below the line etc. The exchange is still new and hasn’t been monetized yet, but in such cases, usually the service provider (Agency) pays.
LimeExchange: Part of the LimeWire group, appears to target professionals for Audio Visual, Graphic Design, Software Development, Web Development, Writing and IT.

Related:
– Q1-09 Results: Media Share Of CyberMedia’s Revenues Declines; How is CyberMedia’s Online Business Doing?Technology Review In India
– Website For Dare, CyberMedia’s Magazine For Entrepreneurs, Goes Live
– The End Of CyberMedia Careers: Resume Database Acquired By TimesJobs

Q1-09 Results: Media Share Of CyberMedia’s Revenues Declines; How is CyberMedia’s Online Business Doing? Technology Review In India

While Sify a bulk of Sify’s revenues now come from the enterprise segment rather than the consumer segment, specialty media house CyberMedia appears to be leaning more towards the Media Services space than the Media business. This is apparent from revenue split, which indicates the growing dominance of the Media Services business - at 51 percent, up from just 32 percent for the same quarter last year.

CyberMedia has reported a consolidated operating income of Rs. 32.9 crores, up from Rs. 22.89 crores for the same quarter last year; CyberMedia India accounts for just Rs. 14.86 crores of this operating income on a standalone basis, up marginally from Rs. 14.44 crores for the same quarter last year.

The Media Business
CyberMedia has recently tied up with MIT’s Technology Review Inc to bring the EmTech Conference to India (focused on Emerging Technologies) to India - and also launch the Technology Review magazine. The conference will be held in early 2009, and the magazine will be launched at the conference. For CyberMedia India (standalone), this segment has contributed Rs. 14.93 crores to revenues, at a profit before tax of Rs. 1.47 crores, down significantly from Rs. 2.28 crores for the same quarter last fiscal.

Historically, Print has been the dominant component of revenues in the Media segment - which consists of Print, Online and Events. An increase in the newsprint cost appears to be a key issue. However, there very little mention of online business. CyberMedia has 15 publications, 12 websites, an events business, and two weekly TV programs. Earlier this year, they acquired the stake of their JV parter in UBM-CyberMedia LLC, for the outsourcing publication brand “Global Services”. Other publications in Media segment include: InfoTech (Dataquest, PCQuest, ciol.com), Telecom (Voice&Data), Consumer Electronics (Living Digital), Biotech(BioSpectrum), Entrepreneurship (Dare) and Legal (Halsbury’s Law).

The Media Services Business
Some of the growth in the media services business can be attributed to the acquisitions that CyberMedia has made over the past year - in March, they acquired the US based TDA group, which provides marketing consulting, content development, web and graphics design to the IT industry. The Media Services segment also comprises of IDC India - a telecom and IT research company, and Publication Services Inc, a content management company which they acquired in December 2006. So CyberMedia has strengthened its Media Services business over the past year.

Note: We’ve contacted CyberMedia founder and Chairman Pradeep Gupta for details on the online business, and also inputs on CyberMedia Dice/Careers, which recently shut down.

Website For Dare, CyberMedia’s Magazine For Entrepreneurs, Goes Live

Sometime early this month, the website for CyberMedia’s Dare, the magazine for entrepreneurs, went live.

The most interesting element of the site is the lead story by Group Editor Krishna Kumar - “Who will be the next manufacturing superpower“, not because of the topic, but because Dare is offering its readers the opportunity to complete the cover story with their opinion, and win a Blackberry. So far, the story has received 40 comments - some of them very, very long. It will be interesting to see if Dare makes a habit of this - of driving readers from its highly regarded magazine (many entrepreneurs I know read it), cross-media to its website.

Content discovery is also being encouraged - the index page displays tags, the latest comments, latest blog entries, stories from different sections of the site. It appears to be a Joomla based site (correct me if I’m wrong).

Dare’s website has taken a lot time to launch - while the magazine itself was launched sometime in October last year, visitors to the site Dare.co.in were subjected to a “Coming Soon” notice over the next many months.

The content on the site is divided along four categories - Opportunities, People, Strategy and Funding, and the site also features blogs. Much of the content on the website is magazine content, and frankly, if there aren’t daily updates, repeat usage will be an issue.

Some suggestions

I’d put blogs right up there, in the proverbial “first fold”, and at least have daily updates. A magazine faces a key issue online - its content is updated weekly, fortnightly or monthly, while users online expect daily updates; in some cases, many times a day. The importance of recency cannot be understated - so either have content that is updated often, or offer users interactivity. Some suggestions:

– Adding relevant wire stories to the site: Digital Today did this for its magazines Business Today and India Today. Editorial selection is of great importance here, since irrelevant or badly written stories (many of those on the wires) will hurt the brand.
– Adding blogs that are updated frequently, and have an editorial mandate: Dare does have blogs, but they aren’t being updated frequently enough, and they don’t appear to have finalized the editorial mandate for the blogs yet. I quite like what Mint has done with its blogs, in terms of content.
– Linking out/Aggregating: I’ve said this before - content is a service. In the b2b space that we are in, you’re providing your readers with inputs that help them make better decisions. In that case, if you’re pointing them towards articles and stories that could be of use to them - why not? Would it hurt Dare to link to a site like VCCircle, which has excellent, relevant content? I don’t think any mainstream publications in India are linking out.
– A discussion forum: forums are grossly underrated, but if you get the right kind of community discussing issues, a site can take on a life of its own. Or even…imagine enabling a live chat session for selected entrepreneurs with mentors or VCs

What do you think Dare should do to increase interactivity?

The End Of CyberMedia Careers: Resume Database Acquired By TimesJobs

A surprising development, albeit sad: BSE listed CyberMedia has shut down its jobs portal CyberMedia Careers, reports Alootechie; the complete candidate database has been acquired by Timesjobs, a portal from BCCL owned Times Business Solutions.

Sure enough, the domain where once CyberMedia Dice was hosted, now features a Timesjobs logo, and here’s a note which verifies the transfer. User resumes have been shifted to TimesJobs.

Grounded By The IT Crunch Or Just Didn’t Take Off?
Has there been a declining demand from the IT sector for jobs? For the past few quarters, we’ve been hearing analysts consistently question Info Edge (Naukri) about the impact of the slowdown in the IT sector (particularly due to exchange rate issues) on the job classifieds business. At the same time, while Naukri’s dependency on IT for revenues has been slowly declining - 31% (Q2-08), 30% (Q3-08), 27% (Q1-09) - though overall IT revenues have been growing. So, frankly, going by the only publicly disclosed numbers in this space, there doesn’t appear to have been much of an impact of a slowdown in the IT space.

Perhaps there has been a greater impact on other job portals, or more of an impact on a vertical specific portal like CyberMedia Dice. The other possibility is that CyberMedia Dice simply did not take off - they reported significant losses in 2006-07, and had a registered database of only around 680,000 job-seekers after over 3 years in operation, compared to Info Edge, which has disclosed over 12 million registered users for Naukri.com.

We’ve contacted CyberMedia for more details.

The CyberMedia Dice Timeline
September 2004: CyberMedia, a specialty media company with a significant focus on technology, ties up with Dice, the largest portal in the world for technology professionals. CyberMedia plans to launch a jobs portal.
June 2005: CyberMedia lists on the BSE
July 2005: PE firms General Atlantic Partners and Quadrangle Group acquire Dice
August 2005: CyberMedia Dice is Launched
October 2006 CyberMedia Dice reports operating losses Rs. 1.40 crores for the first 2 quarters of 2006-07
May 2007: Cybermedia restructuring: E Abraham Matthew to head online properties and Cybermedia Dice
Feb 2008: Dice sells stake in CyberMedia Dice to Pradeep Gupta, founder of CyberMedia. Portal renamed Cybermedia Careers. Reported numbers - over 680,000 registered IT job-seekers.
July 2008: TimesJobs acquires the Resume Database of CyberMedia Careers.

Readers will recall that HP owned Snapfish also recently acquired the database of Merasnap.com