Internet

Zapak Breaks Even: $3M In Revenues Last Qtr, $1M From Advertising

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 10, 2009 ⋅ Post a Comment

Reliance Entertainment President Rajesh Sawhney has disclosed that Zapak, the online gaming businesss from the Reliance ADA Group had reported revenues of $3 million for the last quarter, and has broken even. What’s interesting is that only $1 million of the revenues were from advertising: Sawhney told MediaNama that the rest was from other revenue streams like subscription, and in particular - Events.

So it appears that Events are becoming a major component of Zapak’s business: a couple of days ago, the company announced the Zapak Gaming Championship with Gillete Mach 3 Turbo Winner razor as its headlining sponsor, and with total prizes worth Rs. 1 crore. Prior to this, they had organized the Zapak Corporate Gaming Championship, with Timesjobs as the lead sponsor, and gifts as prizes. Zapak claims a registered user base of 6 million users.

What we’d really like to know about, is how much money Zapak is earning any money from in-game sales - are users playing its Massively Multiplayer Online Game paying to upgrade their racing carts, buy avatars etc., or are they just being given upgrades as prizes or for loyalty? The fact remains that while revenues may be coming from the offline component, the opportunity for scale exists on the Internet - online advertising and in-game commerce should be its primary source of income, and that doesn’t appear to be the case. Dependency on offline events alone will limit Zapaks revenue growth - how many events can they do in a year?

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Advertising, Earnings, Gaming, Headstart, Internet, Results, Zapak

Job Listings On Naukri.com Decline By 22.4% Since July; On Revenue Implications

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 8, 2009 ⋅ 2 Comments

Naukri JobSpeak Nov Update: According to Naukri.com the number of job listings on the site cannot be correlated with revenues:

a. The Revenue model for Naukri.com is largely subscription based which varies from annual to quarterly periods. A large proportion of these are annual contracts. Therefore a reduction in the number of posting does not necessarily translate into a corresponding drop in revenues.

b. Individual listings are just a small component of the Revenues for Naukri. Our other products include Resdex – The database, Branding solutions etc which are not directly impacted by job listing activity.

Original Story: According to JobSpeak, a report released by Info Edge India, the number of new job listings on their portal Naukri.com have been on the decline since July 2008.

JobSpeak claims to to highlight job industry trends, but since it draws its data only from listings on Naukri.com, we see it as an indicator of the performance of Naukri.com. Historically, the recruitment business (Naukri.com and Quadrangle) contributes to over 85% of Info Edges revenues, a significant majority of which is from Naukri.com. Therefore this study by the company takes on even more significance from an earnings perspective.

The Decline In Listings

While absolute numbers have not been shared, the index indicates that for every 1000 jobs per sector that were listed at Naukri.com in July, how many were listed in the subsequent months - hence, a percentage change, rather than absolutes. According to our calculations, the decline since September has been as follows:

Keep in mind that during the Diwali season, recruitment declines. We’re now in the final quarter of the 2008-09 fiscal, which has historically been the best quarter for the company.

Possible Impact On Revenue

It is key to remember that IT Services was among Naukri’s key sectors - contributing around 25.4% to its revenues, so even a 9.65% decline in listings is significant. Banking has contributed to 5% of revenues, so a 40% decline in listings will also have a significant impact on revenues from that segment.

Traditionally, Naukri has depended on large IT clients - the top 10% of their client base (total - 18356 recruiters) contributes 62% of revenues (based on the Q209 Earnings Call), but since the beginning of 2008, they have been working on reducing their dependency on large clients. Info Edge had constituted at Small Accounts Team, looking to increase their client base and reduce dependency. We’ve also heard that they have been fairly aggressive with their sales in the past couple of months - introducing different packages to retain clients. Whether they have dropped rates - we don’t know, but will find out soon during the Q3 earnings call.

Download Jobspeak: Nov 2008, Oct 2008

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Classifieds, Info Edge (Naukri), Internet, Jobs

Rediff’s Minimalist India Abroad Is Live; Social Bookmarking, Facebook, Orkut, Hi5 Updates

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 7, 2009 ⋅ Post a Comment

rediff-abroad Rediff.com is going the minimalist way - the company is in the process of launching a frills-free site, optimised for mobile usage for its international readers at India Abroad. The design is currently being tested, and will be deployed only for the India Abroad vertical.

The front page is icon based, and everything - from the content pages to search results, are clutter free, and only focused on the segment in question. The implications of this design:

– Advertising: As of now, there are only two ad spots - one a leaderboard advertisement on top, and a 300×250 medium rectangle on the right. Take a look at this page, and compare it with this one. Also worth noting is the fact that there are no P4C ads on the page (similar to Google Adwords).

– Content: discovery of content is now very difficult - headlines are key to content discovery, and there are cases where a headline from the sports segment might attract the attention of someone reading a business story. The cross-promotion of content, related articles, most emailed articles — all of that is not a part of this new design. This could result in a decline in pageviews, and jury is out on whether this is a reader friendly move.

More features: (more…)

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Internet, Rediff

Smart Digivision Launches IPTV Services In Haryana with BSNL; 54 Cities By End 2009

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 7, 2009 ⋅ Post a Comment

BSNL has launched IPTV services in Haryana with Smart Digivision, an HFCL company, starting with 3 cities - Gurgaon, Faridabad and Ambala. The company plans to launch the service in up to 93 cities, and is viewing this as a means to retain its wireline customers. Smart Digivision is yet another IPTV company to set itself a bloated target - of 4 million IPTV subscribers in 3 years, and to this end, they will launch IPTV in 54 cities for which they have franchise agreements, according to a release.

Smart Digivision also provides IPTV services to HFCL Infotel customers. As of November 2008, HFCL had a very small wireline user base of 155,155 users, as compared to BSNL which had a total user base of 29,703,496 subscribers, of which 848,328 wireline customers are from Haryana.

The other key player in the IPTV space is Aksh Optifibre: there’s very little available on what IOL Netcom had done in the past year, and Time Broadband appears to be focusing more on the international market - particularly China. At the India Telecom 2008 conference last month, I was told that most IPTV service providers did pilots with BSNL and MTNL, and some of them have not launched commercial services since; we’re yet to confirm officially this, though.

P.s.: we couldnt locate the Smart Digivision website, so in case you know - do tell. An old PDF on the HFCL subsidiary here.

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IPTV, Internet, TV, Telecom Operators

MediaNama Meetup: Bangalore, 8th Jan

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 7, 2009 ⋅ One Comment

You’re invited to join us for the MEDIANAMA Meetup in Bangalore at the Casa del Sol on the 8th of Jan (Thursday, Tomorrow)…It’s a lovely little cafe on the 3rd Floor of Devatha Plaza that looks like a beach shack and is almost as breezy; the chilled beer helps.

We’re hoping to see participation from Internet and Mobile startups, search engine co’s, Venture Capitalists, content providers, aggregators and distributors, analysts and consultants, media companies, technology firms and just people enthusiastic about the digital media space…

* Please Note: This is a meet up and everyone is expected to pay for whatever they order, themselves.

Date: 8th Jan (Thurdsay)
Time: 7:15 PM - 9:30 PM
Venue: Bangalore at the Casa del Sol

RSVP
Nikhil Pahwa: nikhil AT medianama DOT com / +919810310053

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Internet

@Comsnets09: NAVTEQs Marc Naddell On Location Based Service Apps

By Nikhil Pahwa ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ One Comment

At the business track at Comsnets 2009 in Bangalore, Marc Naddell, VP Partner & Developer Programs at NAVTEQ gave some inputs on trends around location based services, both in terms of applications and what consumers are willing to pay for.

On the handset, the earlier applications were from people trying to replicate routing. This was followed by a growth in enterprise applications - fleet tracking, CRM and ERP activities. Then LBS based games, with proximity based games were launched, followed by an increase in the social networking applications. Other solutions in high demand are - locating yourself and your buddies on a map, updating your status with a geo reference, posting comments, metadata tags, sharing files that are geotagged, uploading pictures on a website, recommending things that are profile and location specific. We (NAVTEQ) feel that advertising supported will be come the dominant business model in the future.