Yahoo! India celebrates its first birthday in good health. But...

By Vinod Mahanta

Volumes, volumes, and only volumes, them netprophets said, would help one attain nirvana in pure-play dotcomming. So, what if volumes came inherited? You build around it any thing that fetches moolah, and break even straight away, right? Now read on.

Yahoo's DEEPAK CHANDNANI: unfazed

By the time you'd get to this piece, the Indian edition of Web's most wanted brand (yes, Yahoo!) would have completed a year and a little over a week. For yahoo.co.in, flagged off July 29, 2000, with 3.6 million registered users (roughly 75 per cent of all Internet users in India at that time), the subsequent period was, well, kind of strange.

The Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web, as Yahoo Inc. was known before its incorporation in 1995, has four major revenue streams globally: online marketing, transaction commission, broadcast services, and enterprise services. However, Yahoo India chose to focus only on online marketing. It has managed to monetise its subscribers and build a relationship with leading brands like Pepsi, HLL, Colgate, P&G, ICICI, and Citibank. Also, its fusion and permission marketing strategies have evolved into steady revenue streams.

But in the content market, the J&D progeny comes off poorly compared to a Rediff or Sify. ''What is it in content that yahoo.co.in has and other horizontals don't have?'' asks an analyst, echoing market sentiments. For the sake of statistics, the registrations in India more than tripled from 3.6 million to 12.6 million over the year. But how many of these belong to yahoo.co.in remains a mystery.

Its page view claims too are ambiguous. All that the company would say is that its 12.6 million registrants translate to 700 million pageviews of Yahoo Network from India.

India is the first country outside of the US where Yahoo has installed three mail farms locally so that it is able to counter the ''lightning fast'' Rediff mail. Company CEO Deepak Chandnani has identified Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Search as the themes to push its mind share further. And rightly so. ''E-mail and search are the first two utilities that a user starts with,'' says Chandnani.

Being tardy can be a good strategy when the times are shaky. But in the speed@thought world of dotcoms, Yahoo India's one year of relative ennui reflects poorly on the world's most famous portal brand.

Welcome Watermarks

Managing IP rights online ain't so easy. But two players are testing the waters on their own.

By Rakhi Mazumdar

Now that the days of free lunch on the Internet are getting over, India Online Inc. is waking up to a corollary issue: digital rights management (DRM). What with little or no legislation to aid them, the early birds are going solo in their efforts.

As of now, at least two players have put in place stop gap arrangements. Delhi-based Firstandsecond.com, which is getting ready to launch a new e-book service, plans to retain the rights; readers will have to pay in order to download the book and read it at a fraction of the normal retail cost. G.B.S. Bindra, CEO, Firstandsecond.com, says he will restrict access to the full content, without prior payment for the service. This is perhaps the most common method of preventing unauthorised access and, therefore, misuse of rights.

If download cannot be prevented its distribution can be. In the case of e-books, for example, the book could be locked to a particular PC into which it is downloaded and thereby prevented from being distributed further. ''Rights do not get misused when the content is being transmitted but only when it is distributed,'' Bindra reasons.

Mumbai-based Soundbuzz India, which has tie ups with Tips Music and BMG Crescendo, uses the encryption option to tackle the problem of unauthorised distribution. When a consumer downloads an encrypted (packaged) digital music file, he is automatically (and invisibly) issued a unique licence. This licence contains a key that the Windows Media Player uses to break the DRM envelope on the song and unlock the package as the user tries to play the track. ''The license is unique to the PC (or other device) that the consumer uses to play the track'' says Mandar Thakur, Director (Music & Marketing), Soundbuzz India. Licences cannot be transferred from one machine to another (other than to a portable player if the content-owner allows that). Also, as an additional precaution, Soundbuzz keeps a record of the contact details of the customer.

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