All the World's on video

Source: Business Standard

The number of Indians visiting video portals is rising, but not fast enough for the promoters.

Among other things, 2007 will be remembered as the year when video sharing sites debuted-and disappeared. Close to 20 such sites apeeared on the horizon in 2006-2007 and today, as many as eight of these are down or off-the-web.

But even as video sharing sites like suckoobai.com, iTube.com, Toad, Wisdomindia.tv, and others are down, new ones like 26thjanuary.com have surfaced, looking to strike gold.

Ujjawal Bhrdwaj launched 26thjanuary.com around 20 days ago and claims to already have 7000 registered users and more than 1.5 million hits on it. So how does he intend to survive in the market?

"We have structured our revenue model on advertising from Google(that is, money earned from Google Adwords) and companies who want an online campaign." The main difference between 26thjanuary.com and other sites, he asserts, is that caters to Indians around the world with content in most Indian languages.

Bhardwaj, who runs five more websites like IndianJobsonline.com, MarriageExpress.com and so on, is anything but a novice. "We have not introduced any content-share partenerships in India yet but we are looking to share revenue [with content partners] on a 70:30 basis."

"If one can get appealing content, then there is a lot of advertisement money lying around. Till then it is fight to survive," says Sandeep Shrivastave of Yahoo India.

Stymied by the low numbers of Indian internet users, especially broadband connections(just3 million out of 25 million active internet users), video sharing sites can only hope things will get better next year.

Typically, Google, Yahoo, Rediff, MSN are the big-wigs of the video content industry, besides start-ups like VideoChutney, Meravideo, ApnaTube, Infeedia, VideoCurry, AapkaVideo, and Canaravideo.

These measure individual page views for each item submitted- be it a photo, video or animation. "From that number, the site calculates the percentage of hits it accounted for, sustracting the site's expense to host the video(usually about 20 percent). The number remaining is the profit, split between the site and content creator," explains rajneesh, digital marketing head, MSN India.

The problem with most Indian video-sharing sites is that they have a place to post TVCs, borrowed content like funny animals or bollywood song clippings. A few like Layfile.com, Chatpatevideo or Youclipit.net have scaled the popularity charts owing to their adult content.

Points out Rajnish," MSN soapbox is hoping to shape up as a place to do full length sitcoms or interviews in India."

MSN, like Google's YouTube, also seels keywords to marketers so that when a user searches for a particular word, say "India" or "Shilpa Shetty", the video results that come up can be used as viral marketing plugs. A marketer bids for relevant keywords, with bids averaging between $5-$25.

manish Agarwal, vice-president marketing, Rediff India, highlights how it hopes to make money. "Once a video is uploaded on iShare(Rediff's video portal), advertisers can chose where their ads will appear with a video[pre-roll, post-roll, banners]."

Online video campaigns for brands are also on the cards. Rediff also introduced "voice of Rediff," based on Zee's SaReGaMa Challenge 2007, where aspiring singers can upload videos and audio files on iShare to qualify for the show.

says Agarwal,"We are not making money from this tie-up, but we intend to do similar marketing tie-ups, co-branded video promotions, to create a steady revenue stream for the site."

New entrants like 26thjanuary.com remains optimistic too. Bhardwaj, who's made only $200 from the site until now, loves to cite the example of YouTube, which too wasn't making much money three years ago," but once the company had a big user base, it sold the business to google for a whopping $1.6 billion."

Cheered by ComScore's latest report, which says that 52 percent of online Indians visit entertainment websites and a same number also visit social-networking web sites, Indian video portals are hoping to make it big, some day.