LiveJournal Goes The YouTube Way In India; Hosts Zoom’s Bollywood Club

BCCL Owned TV Channel Zoom TV will be hosting their Bollywood Club community at LiveJournal (LJ); this is the first such “Partner Community” for LiveJournal. Bollywood Club is essentially a talent show on TV, featuring a talent pool of actors, singers, writers, lyricists etc.

What’s interesting is that the same content is available on both Zoom’s site, as well as the LiveJournal community.

Sameer Pitalwalla, Head of Digital at Zoom TV told MediaNama that LJ is hosting the community for ZoomTV for free. Why isn’t Zoom hosting the community themselves? Says Pitalwalla: “the (Zoom) website is where people come to read and view Zooms content- it is top-down. We don’t have a platform ego. If there any way of monetizing a community for us? No! Are into banner ad sales? No! Our sales team doesn’t go around selling banners for the website. We partner with Ad Networks for that.”

Zoom is bunding the LiveJournal community as a part of the advertising offering to Idea, and LiveJournal will be promoting the community on its platform. So that’s what they’re getting out of it. Pitalwala wouldn’t comment on whether LiveJournal paid Zoom for the community. Zoom also hasn’t given a commitment for promoting the community on TV, but it will be providing some support via their Audience Network.

In an emailed response to MediaNama, Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Director of Corporate Development, SUP said that the content on Zoom’s site does not have commenting or social functionality, while LJ does. They believe their users will use the socialisation features. He says that given that LJ is just starting in India, it is important for them to work with new partners and develop new areas of expertise.

The deal with Zoom is a pure marketing relationship, similar to that which Google runs with partners through YouTube. On who has the rights to serve ads on the BollywoodClub Community, Wegg-Prosser said that they’re not monetizing the community at the moment. When they do, they’ll discuss it with Zoom. “In some cases we do rev share and in other cases we do not, it all depends on the deal.”

LiveJournal On Why They Chose India; Plans For More India Focused Communities, Media Partnerships

LiveJournal recently announced the launch of a writing contest in India, in collaboration with Caferati*, a community for writers. Livejournal has a fairly small but highly involved base in India - 5000 unique visitors a month, 13000 registered users.

I spoke to Benjamin Wegg-Prosser, Director of Corporate Development, SUP and Rajesh Lalwani, founder of BlogWorks, the social media consultancy LiveJournal is working with, to get an sense of why LiveJournal chose to focus India, and how they’re planning to grow the user base.

Why A Writing Contest, instead of a celebrity blog, rewards program or an ad campaign?
Ben: We thought a lot about the first thing to do when we came to India, with the team from BlogWorks; we came back to first principle -LiveJournal, anywhere is the world, is a platform for words, generally the written word. Of course, there are many different things to do - and we may well do them later, but we wanted to start with engaging with what we know our community is most comfortable with. This also allows us to engage with those already on LiveJournal, and potential new users.

What are you expectations from the contest?
Ben: We would like significant boost in the number of people who are reading LiveJournal, more signups and obviously, as many people to enter the contest. At this stage, it’s very difficult to put a number on it, but this is a project that has long term value, and can grow of its own accord. In case of an advertising capaign, you need to do something after that. You get a contest going, and it will snowball.
Rajesh: One of the key objectives of the contest is also to seed very effectively, the India Writing community. India Writing is the first such meaningful community that we are hosting on LiveJournal. You will see similar communities being seeded.

Once the contest is over, the community dissipates - so will it be a recurring contest?
Ben: That’s exactly why we will hope that other things come from this. We also believe that in India, there is a market for self publishing. So we’re trying to seed a new community, something which we’ve done in Russia to some extent, but not in the US.
Rajesh: The livejournal community is small, but very very involved with the product. We have taken feedback into many of the things we’re planning to do, and we believe they’ll become the key constituents and take the initiatves.

Could you clarify the numbers - the release mentions 900,000 impressions per month, 5000 monthly unique users and 13000 registered users. Whereas, you’ve yourself mentioned in a post in July has a different number
Ben: That’s because our statistics engine has improved and we’ve got better statistics out.We’re doing a number of different things there - we’re now able to service targeted advertising to IP addresses, and are working with a global advertising network, and will be able to serve advertising to specific Indian IP addresses.

Why India? You’ve actually got more registered than monthly unique visitors from India. The situation looks bleak…
Ben: We’ve not started from scratch in India - we have some people who use LiveJournal. If you take Singapore, we’re ranked as the 10th or 11th largest website; we’ve never done any work in Singapore, but have a reasonably strong position. In our international expansion for LiveJournal, we want to select markets where we have a good position, and we also wanted to choose a market where we have a small number of loyal users.
We feel the market in India is right for growth in self publishing, the growth of people using the web, the growth of literacy, that English language is significant, and India has such a vibrant way of discussing and debating and arguing over issues about politics, the culture, the news, the arts, the economy - we felt it is suitable for LiveJournal. I don’t view it as being bleak - it’s certainly a challenge, but it’s important for us as a business to be able to try and grow in completely new markets.

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