Having done a branding coup with two shattering exposés, Tarun Tejpal wants Tehelka to be a mini-media conglomerate with a bevy of plans for TV, publishing, music, and of course, the Web.

By Suveen K. Sinha

Till mid-March Westend was a hotel, a good one, in Bangalore, and Tehelka.com, the website that had shot some marginally damaging spy-cam footage on the fixing of cricket matches and then faded into dotcom limbo. Its average monthly pageviews of 11-12 million, while not insignificant, certainly weren't spectacular. Operation Westend, or Armsgate, as the popular press termed it, seems to have changed that, if only temporarily.

Tehelka, an Urdu word that translates as splash or sensation was conceived early last year by Aniruddha Bahal, a 34-year-old journalist with a penchant for investigative journalism; he'd written extensively on match-fixing in news magazine Outlook in 1996-99 and wanted the site to focus exclusively on investigative reportage.

That notion changed dramatically once Tarun Jit Tejpal, who had given Bahal his first job as a sub-editor in India Today (part of the same group as this magazine) and worked closely with him as Outlook's Managing Editor, came on board as Editor-In-Chief of the site and Managing Director of parent company Buffalo Networks. Tejpal, who put in enough money to become the single-largest shareholder of the company with a 41.75 per cent stake, expanded Tehelka's coverage to make it a site that provided news, views and all the juice. He also added a literary channel to the site, perhaps a legacy of the publishing outfit he founded along with his brother Minty Tejpal, a former producer at Channel [V], India Ink. ''The aim was to offer the readers a magazine on a daily basis,'' says Tejpal.

Missing Out On Westend

Tehelka may have failed to cash in on the advertising potential of its exposé. Its page views on the day it published the report touched seven million, and it has attracted an average of over a million visitors every day since, as against the earlier average of a little more than 3.5 lakh. But the company denies reports that it doubled ad rates from Rs 250 for a thousand impressions to Rs 500 immediately after. The official line? Ad rates remain unchanged at Rs 350 for a thousand impressions; and all footage provided to television channels was gratis.

The company did make some money by selling the rights to air the entire 100 hours of taped coverage to Zee for an undisclosed amount. But with advertisers not exactly rushing to advertise on the programme, the channel had to eat crow and reduce its ad rate from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 1 lakh for a 10-second spot. Tejpal won't say money wasn't a consideration; what he does say is: ''We could not monetise the whole thing. The money from Zee will more than cover the cost of the operation, but it is not astronomical.''

Making a splash

Maybe, Buffalo failed to capitalise on the marketing potential of the tapes because it hasn't had a head of marketing since Rekha Khanna's departure two months back. Or maybe, it is impossible to make money out of such operations. Not too many companies want to be associated with coverage that ruffles feathers in the political establishment. Several rival dotcoms, analysts, and venture capitalists even refused to be interviewed for this story.

Then, the public appetite for such stories may well be limited. If sensation becomes routine, it may no longer remain sensational. Says naukri.com CEO Sanjeev Bhikchandani: ''You cannot do 10 exposes in a month for the simple reason that there is a limit to how much the market can take-perhaps, one every three months at the most. This model is not very scalable.''

All this wisdom is not lost on Tejpal, who is busy putting together a business model that envisages Buffalo as a five-division media company with firm off-line revenues to support the not-so-firm online operations. Thus, television software is soon projected to become the single-largest component accounting for about 45 per cent of the revenues. There are already 15 people dedicated to this division, headed by Minty, and deals with various channels are under discussion. The other three businesses will be book publishing, with eight to 10 titles a year, a design studio, and music production.

Buffalo will also make efforts to leverage Tehelka's strengths in the content domain. The company claims that since its site does not offer chat or e-mail, the only visitors it attracts are those interested in the content, and that close to 80 per cent of its traffic comes from non-resident Indians. ''We will make substantial efforts to syndicate our content and will also evolve a subscription model by end-2002,'' says Tejpal.

Armsgate may not have brought in revenues, but its role in ensuring that Buffalo did not face a problem in raising its second round of funding can't be discounted. Zee will pick up a 26.1 per cent stake in the company. Tejpal says the company's valuation has doubled since its inception in June 2000 to Rs 65 crore. Zee will thus bring in Rs 16.90 crore even if no premium is attached to the stake (it usually is to holdings over 26 per cent, which confer the right to block special resolutions at the board level). Part of this money will go to First Global, which is diluting it stake by 10 per cent.

For the moment, though, Tejpal and his team are spending the lull after the storm, waiting for a new head of marketing (an agency head, no less, claims Tejpal, but he'll say no more) and plotting their next investigation.

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