Business India 2.0

Today when we meet Publishers and Online Advertising Agencies everyone talks about lack of even 1% proportionate spend by Brand - FMCG advertisers like Nestle, Pepsi, Unilever etc on online medium for reach out to masses.

At a recent discussion organized by Nikhil Pawha  - Mediamnama i meet couple of people which were indicating why brands dont spend online due to lack of performance metrics or sheer scale of medium as always indicated as “New Media or Alternative Media” with just  access to 30 million active users in India when compared to TV & Print which has access to 400 million users.

Being in Online Industry for almost 10 years i have personally been firm believer or positioned the medium as most performance measurable due to automated intelligence and sheer capability to collect data. But the kind of data we collect or metrics people look into like CTR(Click through rate), Impressions served are the just functional data points which were created by us marketers to bring some audit ability to our medium instead we started to use this to compare ourselves to print and TV where lack of such data from publishers perspective makes it harder to define.

On the other hand if you look from perspective of the advertiser like a big telecom giant or big toothpaste brand which caters to mass audience just dont just consider them foolish when they only get excited by wow factor shown by a publisher like a rich media ad communicating to user about their brand or sponsorship to a section against measurement of traffic to their micro site talking about their product as for them being on the online medium is to give user to talk to their brand or be wherever their potential product user.

We as online marketer need to show potential to online brands somewhat similar to how offline medium agencies work where they try to understand the pain point of the brand in terms of market positioning, reach to consumer, brand message, channel problem etc  which a brand face and give solution through medium of advertising to solve these problems and show RoI in simple brand recall + most important increase in sales perspective. This is something very similar to what Naukri’s of the world may do Cost per Resume or as one online marketer was suggesting going Cost per Pizza sold to an International Food Chain present in India it sounds very foolish but its very practical in all sense.

Why cant campaign for a women cosmetics product measure increase in sales or give feedback to brand on lack of availability of their product by sheer interest shown from one region etc.

The WPP and Publicitas of the worlds have for long been measuring performance for brands in offline world and we as online marketers need to come out from our measurement of CTR is what brands are looking for answers and need to get more innovative to drive more media spends online.

In answer to later question which talked about scale which medium provide you are right when some one in discussion from audience mentioned that 90% of audience online already has access to a mobile phone and a telecom brand advertising online will not really benefit in terms of RoI by asking user to subscribe or change providers but knowing so much about our users online give the marketer an edge where we can address specific pain points of our brands like increasing ARPU per subscriber already in a telecom circle where they find potential exist but not been able to crack it via the offline medium etc.

We need to evolve the medium bring in more technology metrics for increasing measurements in simple terms which offline world provides to brands to get access to more money power but another question needs answering do we have capacity to consume a 20,000 crores budget online per year. Answer is NO and we need to grow the medium users or evolve as medium for other mediums to integrate to us. Lets cross the 100 million user mark soon to stay in this race otherwise technology and business models will get too evolved without test user base for measuring their scale and may lead to early collapse of lot like the dot  com bubble burst where lot of entrepreneurs replied with answers of their models being too early for that time.

Hi All,

Nikhil Pahwa Ex-Contentsutra has found his calling and launching Medianama officially

Date: 18th July
Time: 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Venue: Essex Farms, near IIT Delhi
The Discussion: “Surviving A Downturn”
The Panelists: To Be Announced
Discussion will be followed by a Mixer

The discussion on Surviving the downturn will be lead by Leading Personalities from Internet Industry who have seen the DOT COM bubble burst before and how can startups charter out plans to sail through.

If you cannot attend the mixer you can send in your questions which will be answered and emailed back to you. If you dont want your identity or your startups identity to be disclosed that can be also kept in wrap if mentioned in mail.

Looking forward to seeing you all their and best of luck Nikhil!!!

Register HERE http://medianama.eventbrite.com/

Last couple of days i have been touching base with lot of online publishers across length and breadth of our country and have been hearing lot of commentary on how ESPN decided to go off Specific Media ad network and go solo in selling their inventory. Lot of them echoed they might want to consider following the same path others questioned the whole ad network model and how its in favor of advertisers instead of publishers.

Wont like to iterate what my response to them on same was but what would like to say is one needs to strongly understand dynamics of the industry before deciding what is best for them. Indian Internet Industry or even global for that matter works on lot of different metrics where for large advertisers agencies act as middle man on planners for finding out best performing avenues for spending clients marketing budgets.

Now this performance metrics could be audience reach rather matching of demographics, traffic generated to their message site, actual performance if its a commerce campaign etc.

Now lot of publishers will say we may measure up completely on all these metrics then why arent we able to access these budgets??

i) Agencies dont like to work with lot of publishers. Its too much logistics to manage as ops is last thing they want to specialize on.

ii)Agencies need scale, single point of contact and ability to undo its wrong mid of plan by change of demographics or variety etc. Which in case can mean moving completely from one publisher to another

iii) Agency like to minimize risk on media plans by mitigating to buy directly on CPA and limiting buy on CPM on clients favorites like Yahoo!,Rediff,MSN even their they negotiate on CPC etc.

iv) Agencies dont like to buy user generated content. even with all Web 2.0 - Forums,Blogs etc are still not hit with them for their marketing spends(except performance advertisers again CPA driven buy)

How do ad networks help

In India performance is not the tag or help optimize your inventory is still not some what criteria for selection of ad network. Its pure access to kind of advertisers and their ability to consume scale of your page view inventory.

How to evaluate an Adnetwork for your Site

Whenever you talk to an adnetwork please have following metrics to see if they are the best choice for you or not.

Q1. How many impressions can they consume from you per month?

Like all 10 million page views given can be consumed or not)

Q2. How big is their sales team? How is it spread?

This question will let you understand their accessibility to advertisers and pressence in all major cities like Delhi,Mumbai, Bangalore,Chennai etc talk about their reach.

Q3. Ask what advertiser campaigns are currently in system?

If you get answers on all DOTCOM’s like MMT,Simplymarry.com,naukri.com etc then you should again be little wary as these advertisers are one of the easier access as they are completely performance driven and wont value your inventory for its demographics etc.

Q4. Do they have a self serve model for publisher management?

This is essential for you to monitor on day to day basis performance of your inventory given to them etc.

Q5. Lastly try to find out what special they do to train sales team on advantages of having you on their network?

Do they prepare any media kit for your website announce to advertisers etc.

Till the time you have money and reach with agencies where marketing budgets are low hanging fruit it still makes sense to setup own sales team and control like ESPN otherwise you should take advantage of these ad networks working more as sales representation businesses in India to keep driving revenues from Internet Properties you own.

Over last couple of months i have spent lot of times in measuring performance of advertising campaigns on facebook targeted towards Indian IP audiences. But really except for one really dont have a success story which proves Facebook banner display inventory really works for advertisers.

But before we go into details of it works or doesnt work for an advertiser we need to understand the audience available. As most of the campaigns have run are from Indian audience target perspective what we really understand about the rthem on facebook till now is

i) Primarily Sec-A

ii) Average age Male - 23 Female 25

iii) Average time spent on site per user > 45+ Minutes per day

So the audience really sounds prime to be focus of any type of advertiser let it be brand or performance but then why dont we see success.  Now before i start talking about it just to make sure we are not talking about facebook apps, viral marketing etc here. We are looking at facebook from pure display banner/rich media advertising perspective.

What we have seen till now is very high level of engagement of users with facebook as a product ignoring anything outside the framework completely.  what does it translate in terms of CTR(click through rates)

If its a targeted campaign you may see CTR between 0.03-0.04% but in case you run an un targeted campaign it in terms of targeting all Indian IP users then we see CTR between 0.05-0.07%.  If you just go by these numbers then it break laws of all fundamentals one learns as a media planner where targeting is considered god.  But one needs to understand the property more in general instead of just classifying it part of social networking channel. If you compare facebook to myspace or linkedin biggest difference what you see is facebook is just a communication tool between people. Its not generating any content like myspace etc. Which creates a big difference in engaging user to think and then react in terms of suggestive advertising. If you look at properties on offer at facebook compared to Yahoo! Mail for instance, If i was to advertise will select Yahoo! mail over facebook if during pure vanilla display advertising any day why as facebook just offer 120X600, 728X90 which are based on user/community profile pages or search pages etc.

No advertising on Profile page in terms of 300X250 or Logout page etc, We have tried advertising via facebook apps and they tend to give better CTR as compared to what is offered by direct advertising on facebook property. Biggest thing what i have realized is if you want to use facebook to derive traffic to your own property then it will not really meet your RoI set out but if you look at the medium to interact with your product audience,engage get feedback and work on reputation management then display advertising on facebook can complement the actions. for instance if you would like to promote an event or create a community around your product and  then you advertise it to facebook users using the ad inventory available you will see better return and measurement shouldnt be clicks or CTR but number of users aggregated to your community and ARPU generated through a defined 3 months activity plan after aggregation of user.

If you are a brand and have defined resources to manage on going relationship with audiences then it makes complete sense for you to take facebook route and explore interaction opportunities with your audience but if you plan to do a one off blitz and looking for return then trust me facebook is not your cup of tea. Will be glad to share more learning if anyone needs help.

While working on post researching vertical specialized social networking platforms, came across an email from founder of commonfloor.com . After visiting the site found the concept interesting but could not understand the business model.

Would like to thanks Sumit for replying back to my questions. Here it goes

Q1. Brief about Commonfloor.com

CommonFloor is a secure online portal for apartment communities, fostering greater community interaction and offering useful services to the residents.

Q2. Why start a portal, why not try the concept out on a community group of facebook or orkut where already adoption of interaction platform exist?

We tried with the thought of having an app on already existing popular social network but that simply did not work out. CommonFloor is less of the social platform and more of the local platform. With this I mean that people generally don’t want to mix their social circle with their local circle (people they are living with). Also community features are just one dimension of CommonFloor. It offers value to its users in other dimensions also like local information, useful services, administrative features, etc. And with that reason idea of launching CommonFloor as open social app gets ruled out.

Q3. Can you tell us something about the founders their background and what skills they bring to the project?

Lalit and I, both are passed out of IIT Roorkee (thank god not thrown out, courtesy friends). We joined Oracle as the part of campus selection and served there for 1 year as the part of Enterprise Manager Team. Lalit has been rightly called as the idea box since our college time and got a US Patent in his short stay with Oracle.

We both have relevant product development experience and had worked with a couple of startups during our graduation time.

Q4 What and Where is your target audience. How much user interest has site been able to entice till now. Which is the most used feature of the site?

Our user lives in apartment complex and generally married. They are both working professionals and housewives. Site is doing pretty good in about 30 apartment complexes in Bangalore. 160+ apartment complexes have signed up to use CommonFloor as their information management and community building platform. The people are discovering their neighbors most. Things like who is from your native place, who plays cricket, and finding companions to watch a football match together is also in the list. Residents are also using local services like accessing restaurant menus and ordering food online. Apartment Association is finding it useful to have single console management for all their needs and sending important notifications to residents, resulting in better participation in events and activities.

Q5. What is your primary business model behind the project. How do you plan to sustain the venture?

Primary business model is the local advertisement space. We have already tied up with a couple of brands. The execution of the plan will be happening in the next coming months.

Q6. Social Networking has changed how people interact around the world. With today’s youngsters checking their orkut and facebook updates every hour do you feel its pulling people away for feel and touch socializing.

I remember the social networking sites starting up with connecting you with your friends who are placed at some distance to you in space or time. So basically it’s a good idea to connect with your friends with whom there is no feel and touch socializing possible. I agree with it that it might pull people away from real socializing. I feel a need of local networking sites like CommonFloor where people are discovering avenues to meet in their locality, where real life socializing and collaboration is actually possible.

Q7. What are the main hurdles you face in scaling your business?

Meeting up with user expectations is one of the biggest challenges we faced. When we just started up, we had the habit of listening to our users and incorporating their inputs. But now the same become tough. Now the product is much more stable and has become mature and to put up a new feature, we require a number of our users to ask for it.

Other things include getting good people, equally motivated, to work with us. Also the marketing plans and expansion plans have to be re thought of.

Q8. Do you feel their scope in India for other vertical social networking platforms to emerge?

I do feel the need and scope of verticals, provided the vertical can’t be served by having an app on already existing social sites. It should preferably be solving some need rather than just catching up with like minded people. The focus should be inducing some activities in the network. It has to be built around an important part of the users lives.

—–

What i personally found interesting is the way they are looking at social networking. Although their concepts are pretty strong trying to connect locals living in same apartment sharing information which to me earlier sound unusual as till date we have seen primary use of social networking portals to remain in touch with people distance apart.Though i remember couple of years go people living in same dorm in uni use  to stay touch using DC++ Chat rooms and Bulletin Boards hosted for counter strike, this is pretty much similar concept and i recon if can combine more accessibility services like mobile notification of activities or addition of information on lets say menu cards of restaurants etc would help build stronger community.

Other than suggested use of Mobile as medium biggest problem i see in the business model is inability to attach transaction model other than advertising. Their are couple of VAS opportunities which they need to explore to make their business more sustainable.

Hope to see more local communities getting e-enabled using commonfloor.com

Farecast an online airline and hotel fare prediction site has been brought over by Microsoft for 115 Million dollars.  The site one of its own kind offers not only price ranged based search and route connections offering cheapest flying alternatives but takes it to next level by predicting fares of airlines and giving opportunity for people to lock fares for a price.

Near shore in India our home grown Meta search engines look Zoomtra and Ixigo still try to evolve into advertisement driven platform. Biggest problem meta search engines face in India is low rate of adoption of their model by airlines. Airlines dont want to buy traffic or pay per lead. They are ready to share the commissions if you are ready to take responsibility of finalization on your own platform. This is the reason these travel meta search engines fight for space with OTA’s like makemytrip.com, yatra.com, travelocity.com

So how can travel meta search engines survive if they wont get support from airlines? Answer for this would lay with using synergies or competition provided on offers by OTA’s to route traffic to them instead of airlines. Though in short term it will lead to reduction of repeat users but then these meta search engine sites need to evolve with better differentiator tools like a fare prediction algorithm or reverse auction of customer leads to airlines. Idea is to innovate on based of data generated on user pattern instead of relying on advertising or per user lead.

Thanks to Jared blank for replying to questions we had at Business India 2.0.  We wish him best of luck for evolving his business models and give us industry expert insight on evolving Indian Travel 2.0 space.

 Q1.Can you give us a brief on Trip Mela?

Tripmela is a publisher of travel deals for the Indian market.  Of course we have a website, but the primary driver of business is our weekly newsletter.

Q2. Some background on Founders/CEO ?

Two of us founded the business.  Jared Blank has worked extensively in online marketing, including working with Tommy Hilfiger and all-first-class carrier Eor Airlines.  He is a former travel analyst with Jupiter Research, an Internet consultancy. Vikram Sehgal also has analyst experience with Jupiter Research, as well as deep knowledge of the consumer packaged goods industry.

Q3. Why only a deals newsletter. Why not start directly with Travel Meta Search Engine?

We certainly believe that meta search will be a part of our offering, but there are a number of companies fighting for that space.  We plan on implementing metasearch in a different way than most meta search companies, and we hope to be able to show that to you soon.  Even so, we believe that being a publisher will allow us to drive qualified (and profitable) leads to our partners while maintaining a lower cost structure than the meta search players.

Q4. Recently we heard you were leasing white label XML meta search engine from

TravelLab who will it effect your biggest USP differentiator in comparison to ixigo.com

or zoomtra.com?

We have opted against implementing Travellab’s solution while we focus on growing our newsletter business. 

Q5. What is your primary business model? Are you again concentrating on being dependent on cost per lead being paid out by OTA’s.?

Our business model is based on cost per lead.  But once the newsletter has reached critical mass, we expect to generate a significant portion of our revenues from selling dedicated emails to our travel partners that we would send to our email list.

Q6. In the American market deal aggregators or newsletters have really been successful due to the presence of large# of OTA’s. With Indian OTA #’s not growing at same pace as they were in 2006 do you see effect in

Actually, there are more OTAs in India than there are in the US.  The US business has primarily revolved around Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz.  Recently, Priceline has changed its model to compete (pretty successfully) with those guys.  Hotels.com is a large hotel-focused player.  In India, where the market is miniscule in comparison, we have MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Cleartrip, Travelguru, Arzoo, Desiya, Expedia India, Travelocity India, Ezeego1, etc.  This increased competition will make the fight for leads even stronger, which is why you see the Meta Search guys jumping in.

Q7. What kind of revenues/growth are you projecting for the financial year or next 3 years?

We don’t share financials publicly, but we’re taking a realistic view on growth.  The OTAs typically publish their gross sales numbers, not their revenue numbers.  When you look at those, you see that the Indian market is not quite as large as many have been lead to believe.  That said, we’ve created a cost structure that will allow us to be profitable very soon.

Q8. What and where is the target audience for your product. Is it the Indian Audience which is reacting more to your deals or NRI market?

We are focused on the Indian audience for now.  We have some NRI-focused deals, but we think that if we wanted to target the NRI market, we would have to build a separate site (as the OTAs have discovered).

Q9 What are main hurdles you face to get scale in your business?

Getting traffic to the site is the biggest hurdle.  In India, as in the US, the cost to drive traffic to travel websites has grown significantly.  Paid search, for example, is extremely expensive and, so far, has not worked for us because we focus so much on ROI metrics (specifically, cost to generate an email address).  Also, some of the online marketing methods available in the US (such as email co-registration) aren’t yet available in India, or are available only on a small scale.

Q10. What I understand from your site is that you are NY based. Does geographically being present in developed market and operating business catering to a developing economy comes as an advantage or disadvantage?

One of the founders spends a fair amount of time in India, so we have a bit of a presence there, but we hope to have people on the ground this year.  That said, given email and Skype, it’s pretty amazing what we can do even though we’re based in New York.

Q11. We see on your site for airfares you have Yatra.com feed and for hotels travelguru.com feed. Whats your current experience with them and how do you see them and how supportive are these OTA’s to your business model in terms of tech support/business support/knowledge etc

The OTAs for the most part have been interested in the model.  Frankly, they’d hope we can drive more traffic to them, and we think that will come with time.  When we first launched this idea 2 years ago, the model was brand new and we spent a good chunk of time trying to convince people why you’d want to work with us.  That’s not really the case anymore.

Q12. This question is based on my liking of Online Bus reservation systems. When can we see comparision deals on bus travel and Rail travel coming on tripmela.com?

After we figure out how to make money with air and hotel.

 Q13. How do you see online travel 2.0 space evolve in India and whats your long term strategy to become leader in this space?

The whole Travel 2.0 thing has been very interesting to watch in India, since it really developed at the same time as Travel 1.0 in India. It took 10 years for the US online travel market to reach Travel 2.0.  It seems that in India Travel 1.0 (online booking) and Travel 2.0 (consumer-controlled travel content, etc) developed in parallel.  We’ve seen the OTAs building out their 2.0-type offerings (ie, OKTATABYEBYE) at the same time they’re building out their Travel 1.0 booking options.  There will be a place for some of the meta search companies, though there will be some consolidation (or fall off) in that space as well.  I’m a fan of HolidayIQ – it’s a model that’s worked well in the US, and, given the growth in hotels in India in the next few years, should be a great business going forward.

For us, we’re very focused on doing one thing well, and then moving on to the next piece.  Certainly, Tripmela will have a meta search business and a community or reviews piece of the business, but I don’t’ want to do those things until we have the publishing model correct.  Too often we seen businesses working on too many projects at once – a decision that’s expensive and leaves consumers confused as to why they should visit the site. 

 Q14 one more last question. One thing you had mentioned about your business model is that its dependent on people signing up for newsletters. With technology acting as barrier for sending out emailers(eg. Mails going to SPAM/Junk mail folder instead of inbox even though user has opted for them)due to the tough spamming policy how do you manage servicing deals to thousand users every Tuesday?

It’s a good question.  To be honest, only recently have we run into this issue at all, and it’s only a problem with Yahoo’s email.  I know that we are not the only company having issues with getting emails delivered to our Yahoo users.  But I’m certain that this will get straightened out over time.  It’s annoying, don’t get me wrong, but we have historically gotten more than 90% of our emails delivered each week, so I expect this issue will resolve itself.

Long term, we believe that email providers (such as Yahoo) will deliver relevant messages to their users.  We rarely receive spam complaints, and our unsubscribes are tiny. In the long run, providing great travel deals will lead consumers to open our messages and email providers to deliver them.

Since last year lot of people had talked about social networking sites and opportunity it provides to advertisers for reaching out to potential user base.But not much activity was really seen keeping in mind digital advertisers/ agencies approach not to experiment much except to deal with top 10 publishers in India which have their own sales team or take initiative in getting themselves noticed.

Our home grown social networking sites have not really performed with indian networks even yet to open up their inventory. Although facebook, myspace, hi5 are international sites they do get significant #’s from india which surely make them easily break into top sites for users from India.

Alexa Stats | India Ranking

Hi5.com - 53

Myspace.com - 86

Facebook.com - 11

Orkut - 3

Perfspot - 27

Indian Social Networking Sites

- Bharatstudent.com - 22

- ibibo.com - 45

- Minglebox - 96

as you can clearly seen International social networks have higher reach with audiences there are couple of factors which really attribute to their success.

International Networks which are hit abroad get easily adopted by NRI community to connect with their peers locally at university,workplace,interest group level which leads to invitations bombarding in their Indian Peer group which are highly net savvy primarily social urban population this means faster adoption as compared to their indian peers

This is also the reason why advertising campaigns on social networking sites are also getting lower click through rate. As these net savvy users have already learnt to block out non engaging advertisers.

Advertising trend wise International sites like facebook has shown greater response to brand advertisers as compared to performance advertisers if combined with behavior and profile based targeting instead of normal contextual targeting.

Indian counterparts are currently working on generating adoption to their platforms using advertising on other people’s inventories as compare to their own. Once probably they are done with their own we may see them opening up to indian advertisers and really be able to judge their platform advertising potential.

Will talk about which campaign work work best on Indian Social Networking Inventory in next post.

Lately we have been seeing publishers and ad networks getting more worried with more and more traditional digital media advertisers like naukri.com, makemytrip.com etc moving towards CPA model forcing publishers and media agencies executing the plan to get paid when they provide returns on advertising revenue spend.

Lot of bloggers and publishers have talked against this model and especially in India where many publisher sales teams are still gunning for fixed slot and CPM deals not accepting even PPC campaigns makes it even harder to make learn the small publishers why they need to start taking risks to earn bigger revenues.

This lead to evolution of ad networks which are brokers which tend to hedge risk between advertising models preferred by advertisers and publishers.This is done by use of various technologies which slice and dice inventory offered by publishers identifying the best audience for advertisers where they can get conversions in return increasing value for both advertisers and publishers. In India apart  from DGM and Komli to just a small extent, none have been really successful on delivering effectively for industry to move towards CPA model.

I would not blame the publisher or ad networks but mainly the advertiser lot available. In india advertisers which are moving towards CPA model are the ones facing situation of extreme saturation. Why for CPA model to exist successfully publisher and there site audiences need lot of variety in terms of ad options etc. Lets look at category of advertisers pushing for CPA Model

* Real Estate sites - magicbricks, 99acres.com

* Matrimonial sites - bharatmatrimony.com, jeevansathi.com, shaadi.com

*  Job Boards -  naukri.com, monster.com, timesjob.com

* Travel Sites - Makemytrip.com, Yatra.com, TravelGuru.com

If you take any of the categories above mentioned there is no product differentiator or sheer difference in features which would also duplicates to their advertising campaigns. Second biggest problem being faced is most of these players have been in market for some time and casual surfers on internet where they are advertising is more likely to already know the brand and would have registered for their services(ex submitted resume on naukri or monster) further reducing chances of RoI. Though lot of people may argue that there are so many people coming online every month hence their is still scale which web advertising can provide to such advertisers. It is surely wrong to comment on the same. I believe conversion cost against the scale available to naukri or monster will be much higher on web display properties as compared to offline branding properties. For these kind of sites inventory created through other new avenues like cyber cafes or through university exam results site would yeild much higher return.  But again going back to the cause of publishers. For them to perform better in this category if they get advertiser like timesjob.com there is still chance of them getting lower conversion cost from display ad as compared to naukri or monster if they dont go for specific behavior targeting.

So how does the above statement help ??

For publishers to flourish and provide scale on CPA or CPL model for advertisers they need lot of advertisers with variety and availability of freshness. In india lot of agencies feel this is a newer model being tried out by advertisers but people are forgeting affiliate marketing has been a very old concept on internet with businesses like amazon, freebee  and commission junction have flourished.  But the main reason for them to flourish or for the model to flourish was availability of more than 500+ ecommerce ventures in US ready to fight out to grow the market and trying hard to reach out to audiences offering some thing different. Why is Google Ad words flourishing today is due to the fact small businesses are trying to reach out to the larger internet audience giving variety of option to users.

I think so digital media agencies need to teach their clients more about nuances also involved with the model rather than just talking pros of saving money. As in short term its returning them and their clients benefits but in long term its hurting the digital media industry overall.

I would also advice smaller publishers to become more about the CPA model and its advantages but they should carefully sit down and identify the right affiliate program they join otherwise they will end up loosing on precious money they could have just earned running low CPM campaigns from any ad network.

Its the time of the year when you start hearing of education portals launching across India. Every year we get stats thrown in newspapers and entrepreneurs talking about big potential this sector have and how businesses can be built around educational content delivery via digital media.

Year on year same concept same sites same information. There are books available in market being published year by year with special mention to UGC Universities in India guide book which offers complete profiling of UGC recognized educational institutions.

Does india still needs so many sites giving repetative information helping students find the right college and right course. Is a simple search by course name or region where they want to study or by stream they took enough to return the right results on what students are looking for??

Starting a portal targeted to students is much simpler then even providing search to find courses and colleges. Just create a a simple site collecting all admission notifications of education institutions coming in news paper. Create a list which students can sort on course they want to apply for or city. Boom you have a functional site which will have higher usage then high flying course and college finders. Over the years web has evolved information available has increased then why arent people trying to be innovative coming up with much simpler formats??

There have been so many sites in this area admissionhelp.com , admissionews.com, indianmba.com ,coolavenues.com, mbauniverse.com

We have seen so much innovation happening in online travel space why not come up with education meta search engine. I dont blame the indian online space even in US there has not been much innovation in online education space. Some one just needs to rise up and cease the moment to become the biggest.

Question i will be answering next couple of days…why cant i do it???