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There are 2 new posts in "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India" WATBlog Panel Mumbai - Entrepreneurship In Digital Media - An AnalysisThe WATBlog Panel Mumbai on Entrepreneurship In Digital Media - Opportunities & Challenges was attended by over 170 people and the panelists included:
The discussion was initiated by the panelists starting to share their own personal experiences with regards to their entrepreneurship journey. Alok Kejriwal - For my personal entrepreneurial journey I feel ‘Build in India and Sell outside of India’. We did the same at Mobile2win which was acquired by Disney. We are following the same with Games2win.com which is attracting more traction from an international audience. Beerud Seth - As an entrepreneur the first thing that hits you is that the Highs are a lot Higher and the Lows are a lot lower when compared to a corporate job. But its the excitement that makes it worth it. What an entrepreneur needs to keep in mind is to keep experimenting as most business plans usually don’t survive their first contact with customers. We did the same when we changed the model from webaroo to smsgupshup and we got funded and are seeing enormous growth. Sameer Guglani - What digital has done is democratized the power of media creation. This has created innumerable opportunities for everyone to start their own scalable company. The only challenge we face in India is the number of users and the lack of services that solve real user problems. Digital Marketing - Opportunities and Challenges Mahesh Murthy - The money lags behind the opportunity. Most large companies just spend 2-5% of their marketing budgets on digital. This is where the problem lies in the way the 20,000 crore of advertising budget is spent in India. Most of this money is routed through agencies which work for an agency commission or retainer fees. Assuming a large agency handles 1000 crore of business and only 2-5% of that is invested in digital i.e. about 20-50 crores which means the agency probable ends up earning 50 lakhs from the digital business which isn’t really large enough for the agency to invest in people and evangelize digital. According to me this whole system of commissions is flawed as it wont allow the agencies to sell digital the way its suppose to be sold as their isn’t enough incentive to do so. Alok Kejriwal condradicted Mahesh’s points by stating that not all digital spends are through agencies. Maybe 50% is through agencies but the other 50% is out there. Even the fortune 500 companies are not sitting in a box and are trying to know what their consumers i.e. 18-19 year olds are doing. But the issue is the natural interest in Internet isn’t apparent. These marketing directors at these big companies themselve don’t get the medium and hence they don’t end up betting on it. Sameer Guglani stated that the challenges lies in the fact that the online evangelists within companies are given very small budgets to spend but at the same time the opportunity lies in the pay for performance model which he believed could help increase the budgetted spends on digital marketing. Beerud Seth spoke on how the lack of online advertising can be traced back to the lack of ecommerce. He also stated that India is a mobile country and how mobile marketing could be way bigger than what it is perceived to be today. He stated that the numbers on mobile far exceed numbers that internet can reach. He also said that taking concepts from the west and applying it to India just doesn’t work. He felt that the userbase, their behaviour and the marketing spends on digital would be very different than you see in the west. Alok contradicted this by stating that mobile might not be a media for advertising in the first place unlike television which is structured in a way by which consumers cannot avoid ads. The personal nature of mobile makes advertising on the same far more intrusive than any other medium. Gaming - Opportunities & Challenges Alok pointed out that India is a great place to build games as the cost of creating an IP is far far lower than that in the west. This in itself presents a unique opportunity to create world class games from India. Beerud again emphasized the role of mobile in gaming especially sms which is being used by millions to participate in TV contests and to vote regularly. Most of the panelists agreed that monetization was one of the big challenges of the digital media space and even VC’s now were not looking at non monetized properties with respect to funding. UGC & Consumer Web Apps - Opportunities and Challenges Alok pointed out that social networking sites like ibibo and bigadda had slwo growth inspite of the major media spends. He concluded that if you are a good product that word of mouth will be your marketing and you would not need to spend on media marketing. VC Funding In Digital Media Space Mahesh pointed out that VC’s typically look at a 3-5 year horizon to exit companies. The exit options are either a sell out or an IPO. Given the current scenario its difficult to fund a non revenue generating / no business model company as the returns and their timing is not known. On this point Beerud added that smsgupshup was one such company which was spending a lot of cash on sending out messages but was funded. He stated that in the end it all boils down to numbers. If you are able to garner a sizeable mass then funding is easier. On the whole the panel was one of the most interactive and passionate discussions that I have been part of. We shall be releasing the video soon so that you can have a look yourself. It was difficult to encapsulate the entire discussion in one post as there were serveral nuances which can only be understood when you are at the panel. So we hope to see more of you at the next WATBlog Panel. Related Posts Also Check Out: Google Goes Out of Context - Adsense for Unused DomainsGoogle has extended the “AdSense for Domains” program to beyond the US market to International publishers like us. The program also supports non-English languages. The product was initially made available only for English-language AdSense publishers located in North America a couple of months back. It has to be the recession, but domain parking is a dwindling segment in online advertising, so why go back to product that never quite worked for Google? It had stopped providing feeds to quite a few parking provider because many parked pages didn’t quite agree with the content policies of Google. This meant even those domainers who had a sizable share of domains that would have been acceptable under Google’s policy couldn’t make use of its vast advertising pool. Perhaps this move can provide some relief to such domain owners. There are two ways to look at this - one is the Google perspective and the other the Advertiser perspective. Both have reasons to look for newer reach. For Google it can be seen as a desperate move to log on to as much revenue as it can by getting in this niche of publishers on board. While on the other hand advertisers might also be looking at reaching out to this type of audience in a bid to improve on sales while keeping the marketing costs low (compared to offline media). To activate this feature one needs to create CNAME records pointing to Google’s servers. This page has detailed instructions depending on who your registrar is to activate the product. Related PostsAlso Check Out: More Recent Articles
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