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STATS & STRATS What's Hot! A world on boil sparks off a renewed interest in online news, and Indian media barons take a long hard look at their online editions. Now, the game begins. By Team BT Like lunch, like news. The word free, as a prefix, is getting clicked out of the online news domain as Indian media dotcoms decide to cash in on the sudden popularity of their editions. A month ago, in this space, we reported an Indore-based Hindi daily Naidunia-partly owned by vern-player Vinay Chajjlani of the Webdunia Network-asking its online readers to cough up Rs 1,000 a year to access it. Now, The India Today Group (which owns this publication) has restricted its online of content to only the subscribers of the respective publications. And a third media house, Benett, Coleman & Co is asking surfers who visit the website of its mega brand Times of India to register for an e-mail account with the group's horizontal portal, Indiatimes. Says Webdunia's Chajjlani: ''Since ad revenues were not sufficient to maintain the site, we decided to have an advertising plus subscription model. Moreover it's a pilot to see whether our other language properties can be moved to the subscription mode.'' Therein lies the key. Unlike "traditional" dotcoms, media houses can afford to test the seriousness of surfers and later go pay. For example, the India Today Group can use the experience to strategise the future of its popular e-newspaper TheNewspaperToday.com. And for Bennett Coleman & Co, the brand equity of its flagship publication could just be what it takes to infuse fresh life into Indiatimes.com, currently caught in the great horizontal mess. India Today Group Online's COO Kalli Purie observes that ever since the group's online editions went pay, the number of pages read per user has increased: ''It is by putting a price to the access and making it privileged that we have made users realise its real worth.'' Sumanta Pal, Head of Corporate, Times Internet and Times Syndication Services, underlines the larger gameplan: ''Registration will help us understand our surfers better. It is essential for product development and is the first step to a personalised website.'' Pal also has his own brand of logic for asking for a indiatimes.com mail registration. ''We are using the same infrastructure for timesofindia.com instead of replicating a registration database. That's the advantage of having a mail, a horizontal portal, and a media brand.'' Bennett Coleman rules out any of its sites going pay in the near future, but Purie hints that TheNewspaperToday could be switching to the payment mode soon. ''We have built critical mass, have a unique proposition, and we are ready.'' "Pay me", it was said, would be the last message the surfer would like to see on his favourite site. But then, the virtual doesn't suspend the real rules of business, and the surfer ought to be no less serious a customer than the reader. Killing
The Past, Back To Life
Going over things with a fine toothed-comb should come naturally to Vivek Bali. And in fact, that has become his routine ever since he left the haircare operations of Procter & Gamble to head Satyam Infoway's portal division in January 2001. The news now is that the portal-the great white hope of what is left of the horizontal rush-is restructuring operations for the ...sorry, we lost count. If tighter working capital control were the keyword of Sify's last restructuring binge, this time Bali is trying to apply his FMCG experience. Cobweb channels are out, cobranding and channel-sponsorship deals are in. And the portal has slashed its marketing spend-down from close to 30 per cent nine months ago to 10 per cent today-apart from the age-old tactic of pruning communication costs. Says George Zacharias, President & coo, Sify, ''In the past five months we have removed about 5-6 channels that were non-performing.'' But new ones like sitageeta.com have been added too. To improve its topline, Sify hopes to leverage lucrative areas such as auctions, travel, and real estate. Indeed, the company announced a tie-up with Baazee.com last fortnight, for auctions. The products that are now on offer at Sify mall are low-volume, high-value items like laptops and cell phones targeting the cream of the surfers. And, to overcome the great Indian credit card paranoia, Sify has gone in for cash-on-delivery as a payment option. ''This is being done successfully in 166 cities today,'' says Bali. So far, so good. But isn't this what every dotcom-in-distress worth its seed capital is doing? Sify actually belongs to the ranks of the advantaged; portal contributes just 10 per cent of its revenues. Almost 60 per cent of its revenues come from corporate services, and its vast chain of retail internet cafes bring in the rest. In fact, Bali's CEO R. Ramaraj had just written off Sify's entire goodwill of $109 million, earned over the years through its now-maligned acquisitions, citing the decline in valuations of internet stocks. The time he chose to announce this was the declaration of Sify's Q2 results. The sole highlight? The slashing of cash losses for a consecutive third quarter-down to $4.8 million from $6.1 million in Q1 2001. If all goes well, Sify could be the first net surprise of the year. But then, as Sanjiv Agrawal, Partner (Corporate Finance), Ernst & Young says it may no longer be a dotcom. ''Sify seems to be moving from being a pure portal to a e-solutions and network services focussed company.'' That, though, is one Bali-restructuring away. ''I have been involved in restructuring operations earlier too, but never this major,'' is all Bali will say. -E. Kumar Sharma Beam Me, Back, BT! Surfing back@Net time to November 1996 » Extensible Mark-up Language or XML sees the light of day. At the SGML '96 conference in Boston, the first draft for the new mark-up language is introduced. » Copyright squabbles come alive. Two Scottish newspapers Shetland Times and Shetland News go to court with the Times accusing the News of copyright infringement all that the News had done was to give a hyperlink to the Times' site. As the wired world waits anxiously for the court's decision, both parties decide for an out-of-court settlement. » December dawns on an insidious note. The Web sites for NASA, the US Air Force, and the British Labour Party are hacked. 1 2 |
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