NDTV Convergence Ties Up With TutorVista; Our Take On Their Strategy

Going through NDTV.com, we noticed a few sites and sub-sites that we haven’t come across before: Among them, is a tutoring site NDTVTutor.com, powered by Tutorvista.com, which primarily targets their US based visitors. While we don’t endorse Alexa as a measure of traffic, according to Alexa, only around 8.5% of NDTV.com’s traffic comes from the US.

The movies site - NDTVMovies.com also features a new look. We also noticed a couple of other partnerships that the company has inked, though we’re not sure of how old these are - a commodities site powered by commodityonline.com, and an astrology section powered by Astroyogi.com. Interestingly, there’s also an environment site called Green.NDTV.com, sponsored by Toyota, with Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, Director General of TERI as their expert advisor. There’s an environmental anthem for you to sing along to (you may download it here)
Quick take on NDTVs strategy
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Rediff CEO On Current Advertising Scenario, In.com, Paid Services, Apps & Content Deals

Much was expected from the Rediff.com this quarter - as the leading online media site in India, and with around 75% of its India Online revenues dependent on the Advertising - we logged on to Rediff’s earnings call for inputs on spread of the Advertising drought:

Data
– India Online Revenues: $4.04 million (72%) from Advertising , $1.58 million (28%) from Fee based services.
– Advertising revenue split: Financial Services - 15%, Jobs - 15% and Travel - 10%, account for a total of 40%
– 70% of revenue is from display based ads (CPM), and 25% from performance based ads.
– Registered user base of 72 million. Unique userbase grew by 8.4% (Comscore)
– 261 companies advertised with Rediff in Q2, up from 257 in Q1.

Q&A (thanks to @mixdev, @codelust, @ranjanv and Shashikant for their questions)

Online Advertising Scenario
– India Online advertising, which accounted for around 72 percent of revenues this quarter, was down from 75% last quarter, though “on a blended basis, the average yield and average price have not changed.”
– “There’s been no substantial change as compared to Yahoo or Google. We believe they’ve had a similar experience in the market.”
– Financial Services used to spend with Rediff for acquiring Credit Card and Housing Loans, and had contracted the most, but are improving - they’re looking to advertise to get people to deposit money again. Travel portals have cut back sharply, because commissions for them have been slashed. Job sites, which accounted for 15%, are down as well, because of their dependence in IT services for recruitment.

Display Ads over the next 3-6 months?

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LiveMint Launches Podcasts

Mint, the business daily from HT Media, has launched podcasts at its website LiveMint. Titled LiveMint Radio, it features interviews with entrepreneurs and investors from the Silicon Valley, and is hosted by Kamla Bhatt of the KamlaShow. The first interview to go live is with Yogen Dalal, Managing Director of Mayfield Fund, and this will be followed up with interviews with Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn and Mitchell Baker, Chairman of the Mozilla Corporation. Remember that Kamla Bhatt earlier used to do podcasts for Podtech, though the KamlaShow has been live for much longer.

Another show worth noting is the Expat Podcast, which provides an expatriates view of life in India, with inputs on how to “get your phone working, get a gas connection”. At present it features some expat Mint journalists, but they intend to follow it up with views from other expatriates.

Playthings, a Mint blog, also has its own show called Playcast, with inputs on websites, gadgets, games, game culture etc. The first Playcast features, interestingly, local search startup AskLaila.

No downloads, no permalinks?
While I liked the fact that some of the shows - particularly those with Kamla Bhatt, have transcripts available (this helps in SEO, and more importantly, the readers who’d rather skim through the interview) - there isn’t an option for downloading the interviews. In a bandwidth constrained country like ours, audio streaming might be an issue, although I must confess that I didn’t face any such issues. Nevertheless, an integration with iTunes for iPod downloads, and an MP3 download might help.  For some reason, IBNLive doesn’t allow download of podcasts either, though it’s not difficult if you’re using RealPlayer.

The other thing is - the Expat Podcast and PlayCast are available only via a popup window, with no permalinks to the podcasts, making it difficult for users to share with others.

In terms of an interface, I think Podtech had it figured out.

Live Current Media Negotiates Reduction In BCCI Payouts By $1.25 Million For This Year And Next

Live Current Media (LCM) through its joint venture Global Cricket Ventures, has been able to successfully reduce payouts to the Board for Control for Cricket in India by $1.25 million. LCM had won the portal rights for the IPL website IPLT20.com and BCCIs website BCCI.tv.

According to a release, wherein the company also announced that they’ve has reached an agreement to build, manage and monetize the official website of the Champions League Twenty20 for 10 years, GCV also announced that “during the recent IPL franchisee offsite in Bangkok, the venture negotiated a reduction of its minimum revenue guarantee under the BCCI.tv contract by $1.25 million over the remainder of this year and next.”

Some inputs coming in from this article as well, according to which the earlier deal involved a minimum guarantee of $5 million/year for 10 years from LCM to the BCCI. Revenue up to a level of $5 million each year would go to LCM, and subsequent revenue would be split between LCM and the BCCI. LCM also owns Cricket.com, and revenues from that were to be entirely for them. Read the article for inputs on the story of how the BCCI deal was struck.

At the same time, not all is hunky-dory for LCM: given the financial situation, the company intends to raise $6-10 million over the next 90 days from the sale of six of their domain names - Brazil.com, Vietnam.com, Indonesia.com, Malaysia.com, GreatBritain.com and even Communicate.com (which was LCM’s name earlier).

Related:

– Global Cricket Ventures Moves Fantasy Cricket Game Out Of Facebook, To Cricket.com
– BCCI.tv Launched By Global Cricket Ventures, A Live Current Media - NetlinkBlue JV

Malayalam Newspaper Mathrubhumi Goes Mobile

Mathrubhumi, among Kerala’s most prominent newspapers, has gone mobile as a co-branded site with Kerala based startup MobMe Wireless. While access to content is free, and users can download images published on Mathrubhumi in various sizes for free, they do need to sign up to comment, and verify their mobile number. MobMe co-founder Sony Joy told us that the registration is necessary to ensure that the commenters are traceable.

MobMe has a revenue-share deal with Mathrubhumi, and are combining to sell ads for the mobile platform. “It’s easier for Mathrubhumi to get advertisers. We’re testing the waters on the usage patterns, and how the SMS marketing is working right now. Around 46,000 subscribers have subscribed via SMS, and we’ll be sending them WAP links - 2-3 alerts every day. We’re not looking at advertisements on those SMS’ right now”. I asked Joy about operator tie-ups, and he said they’re looking that option, since the site helps increase GPRS usage.

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MyToday Launches Breaking News Updates; Whose Content Is It Anyway?

Update:

Rajesh Jain, not surprisingly, disagrees with our opinion that NayaNaya and MyToday.mobi are publishing content. What matters is not how we interpret what MyToday is doing, but how publishers view it. Let’s see how they react to how ads are removed from their content.

Jain says that Transcoding (which we’ve explained below) is an intermediate solution, and the problem with RSS feeds is that they provide links to pages which are not mobile friendly. He suggests that sites create a separate RSS feed with breaking news that link to their mobile versions, or if they “want RSS feeds dropped from the NayaNaya sources, we will do that also.”

Original story: Rajesh Jain’s MyToday, better known for its editorialised push SMS services, has launched a series of WAP based portals, focused on the breaking news genre. NayaNaya features separate mobile-ready sites, covering News, Business, Cricket, Technology, Movies etc, writes Jain. The content on NayaNaya.mobi is being aggregated from various sites, apparently using RSS feeds.

What I found most interesting about MyToday.mobi and NayaNaya.mobi, is that they’re displaying the entire content from a particular article, within the MyToday ecosystem. Take a look at content from Rediff, Afaqs, and Glamsham. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if entire articles (not excerpts) are stored within the MyToday ecosystem, then it is essentially publishing the content.

Repurposing content for the mobile and hosting it at MyToday is a one-size-fits-all strategy - it’s a platform role like the one being played by YouTube. This aggregation also reminds me of Google News, and the court case with Belgian newspapers. A problem arises from the fact that some media companies would prefer that the links redirect to their mobile sites, so they can monetize that traffic. Rediff and IBNLive are possible examples.

While some media organizations might be fine with their content being made available on the mobile, others will not, particularly if MyToday mobile gets monetized. NayaNaya has space for an advertisement - see this CNBC story, and the “Top Ad” space.

Possible Solutions:
– MyToday can offer to just host the content, much like YouTube, and offer a revenue share to publishers.
– Or, as a value add, MyToday can actually help power branded mobile versions for some of these publishers, for a revenue share deal, and a monthly maintenance fee. At present July Systems is providing mobile website solutions to media companies like HT Media, NDTV and Network18.
– Redirect to those sites which have a mobile version

Note for MyToday: the following pages for Business Standard and IBNLive did not load.

Global Cricket Ventures Moves Fantasy Cricket Game Out Of Facebook, To Cricket.com

Global Cricket Ventures (GCV), the joint venture between Live Current Media (LCM) and Netlinkblue, appears to believe that their application will do better out of the Facebook ecosystem,  than within it.

The game, once hosted at http://apps.facebook.com/fantasycricket/ has been moved to www.cricket.com. Cricket.com is among Live Current Media’s portfolio of premium portals, which also includes boxing.com, perfume.com and karate.com (related story here), among others. LCM had bought the cricket fantasy game for $25,000, with an additional performance dependent payout of  $10,000. The game was live during the Indian Premier League, when I first saw it. LCM claims to already have more than 750 registered team entries “in the first 24 hours of operations”, but…aren’t they just teams that have been ported from Facebook? Global Cricket Ventures has also appointed Alex Chamberlen as Chief Revenue Officer, who moves from competitor Cricinfo.com. Chamberlain has the Global Head of Sales for Cricinfo, from Sept. 2004 to Aug 2007, and has 15 y ears of media experience.

(also read: BCCI Gets Restraining Order Against Online Fantasy Cricket League, Rediff; Why Rediff?)

*

LCM had bought exclusive portal rights to the Cricket tournament Indian Premier League (IPL), and the rights to manage the portal for the governing body BCCI, for $50 million for 10 years. Promoting Cricket.com was a part of the plan, but that hasn’t been implemented, until now. According to their SEC filing for the last quarter, revenues for the first season were immaterial. This is probably because the deal was announced just a few days before the season began, giving them a couple of days to get the IPLT20 portal up and running. And, signing these deals were expensive:

The Company has incurred substantial costs relating to negotiating and performing under the terms of the MOUs with each of the BCCI and the IPL, and establishing the venture with NLB.  During Q2 of 2008, these costs totaled $678,222 (Q1 of 2008 - $55,317) including, but not limited to, expenditures for business development, travel, consulting, and salaries. Not that the expenses are going to reduce: On or about October 1, 2008, the Company is scheduled to make a payment to the BCCI in the amount of $625,000 and a payment to the IPL in the amount of $375,000, in connection with the Global Cricket Venture.

I wonder if GCV and LCM will survive the IPL.

Related:
- BCCI.tv Launched By Global Cricket Ventures, A Live Current Media - NetlinkBlue JV
- ContentSutra: BCCI Gets Restraining Order Against Online Fantasy Cricket League, Rediff; Why Rediff?
- Nimbus Looking To Raise $140 Million: Report; Nimbus Mobile?
- Sports: ESS Pays $975 M For 10-Yr Champions League T20 Rights; ICL - $110 Spend, Games2Win Tie-UP