TekChakra.com

While I sparingly use Burrp and almost never use Mouthshut, I dont really see how either of the models can be money spinners for the owners or any VCs looking to invest. My gutt feel tells me that Mouthshut is probably making revenues of about $3,000 per month and Burrp is yet to monetize significantly. The visitor traffic numbers simply don’t add up to the large scale and traffic numbers that investors look for. I estimate Burrp is getting around 9000 daily page views and Mouthshut is getting around ten times that amount - of about 50,000 daily page views. For those not familiar,

Equation for free content portals:

High Traffic = High Adsense Revenues

So, some quick math will tell you that at a $2.00 CPM rate - Mouthshut makes around $100 daily and Burrp around $18 per day.

Both sites are very well designed (Burrp specifically) and some visitor traffic is coming in, but the numbers are still too low.

A recent Business2.0 article quotes CEO of Burrp - Deap Ubhi, saying that Burrp gets 80,000 visitors to the site daily. I beg to defer. Alexa ranking comparison shows not more than around 9000 page views - which probably is about 1500 visitors daily. I dont know why statistics reporting program Deap is using? Am I missing something?

My take is that these are both good free-content web models to be monetized by ads, but the time is not ripe yet. We’re still about 3 years away for these Web2.0 and “review based” free-content models to work in India. There simply isn’t enough of an audience still.

My question to readers… while the ad revenues generated may not be high enough currently - do these models have potential in the long run?

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

I still cannot comprehend logically what Reliance is trying to do with ZapakMail. While the Zapak gaming site launch makes some sense - but not much business sense in terms of how they plan to recover the money they’ve spent on their media blitz - ZapakMail seems to be a complete failure. They’re probably signing up a whopping 50 to at max 100 webmail accounts daily… and their traffic ranking shows a dismal 1500 page views daily. In comparison Zapak probably does about 500,000 page views daily - and in that sense it has been somewhat of a success when put side-by-side with other Indian free gaming content portals like Games2Win - which in my opinion is enjoying a very short-term ride, with current traffic pegged at about half of what Zapak is getting.

Going back to ZapakMail - I still haven’ a clue of what they are up to with that? Can anyone please comment and help me out … maybe I am missing something here?

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Rajat Jain from Disney has taken over as CEO and MD of Mobile2Win, replacing Rajiv Hiranandani who will continue to stay with the company. Lets hope that Mobile2Win’s quality of mobile and web games (found on Games2Win) improve in quality with this move. I’ve taken a deep look at their mobile and web gaming content - and a lot of it is completely sub-standard in quality. On contacting someone at Games2Win to find out why the games are of such low quality - I was told that they were under tremendous pressure to churn out 2 to 3 games every week. Wow! some guts. No wonder the quality of their self produced and self published content is of low quality. I am basically comparing them to the global game quality standards that you find on popular casual gaming sites like MiniClip, Popcap , Kongregate etc, and global mobile gaming companies who have setup base in India, like Digital Chocolate, EA mobile, Glu, Gameloft etc.

While I totally understand the managements move to churn out and quickly build a gaming portal with a large number of casual games trying to match up and defeat the numbers found on other local competing sites like Zapak.com - I dont see this working in the long run. True you can stir up people and get traffic to your site by releasing games with catchy titles like “Magic Fingers” with themes like Massage Parlor - but I can guarantee you that 100% of the people who played that game were probably completely put off with the low gameplay experience and will not return to play that game. It has zero stickyness and addictive quality. Its the Internet they are messing with here… and people are one click away from stellar casual gaming sites like MiniClip or Kongregate - and sooner or later the word will spread into India at a mass scale (just like Orkut and Facebook invites have been flooding into people’s mailbox).. and people will move over to these high quality casual gaming sites. Games2Win and Mobile2Win may win in the short run - but, this is  not a 100 meter dash! Lets hope the new CEO realizes this.

Also, putting your sponsored Games2Win link on Google whensome searches for “top web game portals” or “casual games” is not going to help. You’ll definitely get all that PPC traffic to your site… but since this is a “viral” medium and can grow only if you have stellar and addictive content that people talk about and pass around at parties… for example - “oh have you played that awesome Desktop Tower Defence game? its nuts… i got hooked on to it for 3 hours straight… and cant get enough of it!”. Desktop Tower Defence is a game developed by one guy that has been played of 15 million times in a couple of months - something a site like Games2Win needs to learn from - how a single game developed by a single guy has produced 1000 times more traffic than a site with 200 plus games developed by an army of novices.

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Here’s a daring stunt. News.com has reported that Bollywood 3D is planning to produce a LAN multiple player RPG game prior to release of the hindi movie. The game will have characters inside it that will be present in the movie. They plan to sell these games for $1 to $2 per copy (to combat piracy levels) - and hopefully stir up enough publicity and gamer traffic that the game sells a lot and becomes a hit LAN party game. They’re planning to hold LAN tournaments and give away prizes such as, meeting the movie stars, free premier tickets and free movie merchandise. The movie is based on a futuristic crime story entangled with a love story. The budget for the game is said to be around $100,000.

My take - This is NOT going to work. Simply because they are targeting hardcore gamers who do a lot of LAN gaming - and this is the last thing they want to waste their time on. Winning tickets and merchandise for a movie that you know absolutely nothing about is a joke. Why would I spend $2 and my precious gaming time to switch over to a game and movie i have absolutely no idea of. This would’ve worked if your movie was a big hit and you were coming up with a sequel AND your movie appealed to the gamer-types. For exampe - this works and has worked well with fan-fanatic movies like Lord of The Rings or Star Wars… and when they release pre-movie games - fans go crazy and rush out to buy the game, even though they cost as much as $40 a pop.

This is probably just a publicity stunt to get the word of the movie out. I dont think this is going to work and they better focus on the plot and quality of the movie - if they want a die hard gamer-type fan following, and perhaps then they can try this stunt in Bollywood 3D movie Part 2.

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Rediff launched its Video, Music and Photo sharing site ishare, just last week and has gone on an advertising blitz to get the word out. Traffic to Rediff.com has been steadily declining over the past few months, and hopefully this will change things for Rediff.

Rediff is yet another Indian company that continues not to innovate and come up with unique Web2.0 models, but rather chooses the simpler path by copying successful Web2.0 models that have worked overseas. What I fail to understand is why Rediff took over 18 months to realize this. Also, I’m pretty sure they are using a ready-to-go off-the-shelf white label solution called KickApps, so a delay could not have been attributed to development time. Perhaps, it was a legal angle to the business model …and Rediff wanted to see how Google and Yahoo would play out the lawsuits being filed by consumers towards their video content. Even if so, its just taken too long for an Internet company to react and decide - this move should’ve been made months ago (probably a year ago) - and perhaps then there was some chance for the NRI and Indian crowd thats hooked on Youtube to visit Rediff.

Read more…

— Vishal Lamba    Filed under: Uncategorized | No Comments »