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From a three-member outfit just a year ago, the Delhi-based Friday Corporation is now 52-employee big. Recently, it snapped up rival Matrix Information Services in a bid to consolidate its position as content provider. By Vinod Mahanta
Since March 2000, Friday has seen more than its share of the action, it started off with three employees and now has a staff-strength of 52. They launched content services, going about it in a step-by-step way. First on cards: lifestyle and entertainment content service, with Madhu Jain, formerly a senior editor with India Today, as its head. Next was the business and finance content service. This year Friday plans to launch eight verticals, in areas such as infotech, corporates, and education. "The objective is to give the quality content depth, while developing comprehensive back-ends," says Vishal Dhar, CEO, Friday Corporation. Friday Corporation is trying to position itself as an end-to-end content solution provider. It is in the business of re-purposing and re-packaging the content. For sourcing content, Friday has formed alliances with 230 content providers including newspapers, magazines, and ICRA etc. Today, Friday basically aggregates, repackages and delivers content for multiple channels like print, wireless, corporate intranets, radio, and broadband. Most of their clients are dotcoms. Sensing the different content needs of dotcoms, they offer content that is customised. It could be providing essential content like news, yellow pages, or syndicated content. They provide 10-15 per cent of exclusive content on the websites that subscribe to their services. Friday has managed to tot up a customer base of 130 clients. It provides content to a variety of magazines and newspapers like Outlook, Man's World, Business Standard, TheNewspaperToday.com, and Dainik Jagran. But portals remain its biggest clients. Some of Fridays' web clients include MSN, Mysticalstyles, Indya.com, Netkracker.com, and brandquiver.com. Friday's ASP model enables the customer to choose from a content menu that can be customised and delivered to match the look and feel of their individual websites. As more and more websites downsize their content teams and start outsourcing their content, there is a clear opportunity ahead. "The number of enquiries and the quantities of content sold have both gone up in the last couple of months," says Simarpreet Singh, CEO, Allwonders.com, a content provider. Friday also plans to tap the lucrative corporate intranets market. Friday has tried to build revenue streams by providing value-added services around content. The company has also launched a consulting initiative wherein it uses its ASP model to provide high value consulting to its clients. For just Rs 48,000, a website can get content from Friday for a whole year. The company also makes money through providing content management services for sites like msn.co.in. The services include site audit, content digitisation, and wholistic content management. Friday recently acquired Matrix Information Services, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Kotak Mahindra Finance. Apart from increasing its customer base, the acquisition is expected to help Friday offer a broader range of services. At present, Friday specialises in entertainment and lifestyle content, while Matrix specialises in business and financial content. Matrix has been in business for over three years and have mature content management processes. "This acquisition has given us tremendous value in terms of people and processes," says Dhar. Matrix also has 120 alliances that will add to the 110 that Friday already has in place. Matrix's client list spans a broad spectrum of companies and institutions, including HLL, Ranbaxy Laboratories, Cipla, Cadbury, Lintas, US Embassy, Citibank, BBC, and Johnson & Johnson. Kotak Mahindra has taken a 7.5 per cent equity stake in Friday Corporation through its 100 per cent subsidiary Kotak Mahindra Investments. What really puts Friday's moves in perspective is the global scenario in its chosen areas of business. Internationally, big content players like Streaming Media and iexchange, are doing good business. The global content market is valued at $140 billion and it is projected to grow to $275 billion by 2003. Friday Corporation is planning to set up an online international exchange where they can trade content and earn revenue. It is also thinking of tapping the lucrative market abroad for Indian content. To this end they are targeting the 200 sites and 100 publications that cater to the Indian diaspora. In the non-NRI segment, there is a demand for spiritual, ayurvedic, and other traditional content. The international publications want more and more Indian content. "We live in a global market today and there is demand for Indian content," says Dhar. They are already managing content for a UK-based portal hotcourses.com. The markets have been less than kind to most dotcoms so far this year. A host of tech start-ups that were only a few months back crowing about their global-level plans are finding themselves placed between a rock and a hard place. With dotcoms going belly up by the dozens, it's up to Friday Corp's crew to show that it will fare any better in the uncharted waters that lie ahead. |
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It
was late evening February 2000, Vishal Dhar, Arjun Sawhney, and Nikhil
Khanna met at Dhar's residence for dinner. The discussion veered around
the dotcom phenomenon. All of them worked for PR agencies and were
witnessing a rise in the number of dotcom clients they had. A lot of these
clients were cribbing about the shortage of content. That set the trio
thinking. A quick dipstick survey of publishers gave them an insight into
the content market. The logic behind the survey: the biggest gainers in a
gold rush were those who supplied the picks and shovels. The dotcom mania
was at its peak and they wanted their share of the pie. They set up Friday
Corporation---a content solutions provider. They survived on the start-up
sum they had pooled in, for the first six months. Later money was pumped
in by some individual investors and an international private fund. Cut to
February 2001, the trio were scouting again, this time for a content
company.