Digital Transformation - Redefining Industries

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Vishal Thursday, September 18, 2008 Article , GuestPost , Media , News , Trends Subscribe via RSS Feed
This is a second guest post by Rajesh Jain, an entrepreneur based in Mumbai, India, and or, Subscribe via email:
Founder and Managing Director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd. He has put together his
thoughts on News and Content in a Digital World. Lets explore what he has to say: Enter your email Go
On Friday (August 1), I was part of a panel at an event organized by afaqs - “The Future of
News.” My panel’s topic was “Who will subsidise Digital Content?” Here is a gist of what
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spoke:
Summary - Australian Startups
It’s not about subsidising but about monetisation: Thinking subsidies necessarily
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implies that the primary source of revenue is somewhere else. How can we look at the Archive
digital world independently and see how content can be monetised? On the Internet, the
June 2012 (2)
only revenue stream is advertising. My belief is that the mobile is where the big action and
opportunities lie. On the mobile, one can create multiple monetisation streams - from not April 2009 (5)
just advertisers, but also subscribers, merchants and enterprises. For this, creating a March 2009 (5)
direct-to-consumer relationship is essential. In other words, content owners need to think February 2009 (1)
of themselves as “VAS (Value-Added Services) Operators” [complementing the Voice December 2008 (2)
Operators] in the mobile space. October 2008 (1)
Digital will be about M3 and N3: Content in the digital space needs to focus on Mobile, September 2008 (13)
Mass and My (M3) and Now, New and Near (N3). The Mobile will be where we will get our August 2008 (27)
news first - before any other medium. The sheer numbers make it the biggest Mass July 2008 (9)
medium in India. We will also want “My” news and other content to be personalised - June 2008 (14)
things we are interested in. We want to know about things Now - as they happen. We want May 2008 (3)
to also be kept updated on the New stuff - the Naya Naya. We also want to know what’s April 2008 (7)
happening Near us — in our neighbourhood. Putting all this together will create the March 2008 (43)
foundation for the opportunities in the Digital space. The mobile can thus provide not just
February 2008 (9)

2. instant updates, but also offer a window into reach media services (images, audio and April 2007 (1)
video).
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First, Create a Right of Way: The first step towards moentisation involves creating
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services that touch people multiple times a day. On the Internet, Search has done this very
effectively and thus created the foundation for companies like Google to take that attention
and convert it into cash. On the mobile, I think it will be about SMS and Subscriptions. Use
This work is licensed under a
free, permission-based push services on SMS to create the right of way to consumers thus Creative Commons Attribution
building a subscriber base and creating ‘Media on Mobile’, and then leverage that attention 2.5 Australia License.
to creating multiple monetisation streams.
Become a VAS Operator: An operator has a direct-to-consumer relationship. In the
mobile world, Voice operators have done phenomenally well in using voice as the anchor
service to create additional revenue streams. But their focus is still not on VAS. What India
needs (and can lead the world in) are VAS Operators. Besides the direct-to-consumer
relationship [starting perhaps with SMS subscription services], VAS Operators have three
additional characteristics: multiple services, multiple revenue streams, and alternate
payment channels. The VAS Operator opportunity in India in the next three years is to
reach 50 million subscribers, generating a monthly ARPU (average revenue per user) of Rs
50-100.
Mobile can be an excellent Youth Marketing Medium: Mobiles are increasingly the
centre of our lives for communications and interactions for most of us. For Young India, it
is even more so. In a world of fragmenting mainstream media attention, the mobile can
become the magnet for reaching out to youth - because it is personal, and always available
and always on. Digital content companies need to think of strategies to use all the mobile
bearer channels (SMS, Voice and WAP) to reach out to the Youth.
MyToday provides a good case study: My company, Netcore Solutions, launched
MyToday’s free SMS subscription services in October 2006. Since then, 3.6 million people
have subscribed to an average of 3 channels each. MyToday sends out about 12 million
SMS daily - about 4% of India’s SMS traffic. While SMS advertising is the first and most
significant revenue stream, the Right of Way to the subscriber base is enabling us to create
innovative new revenue streams in the form of Pull services (request-reply on SMS),
Email2SMS, WAP traffic to our portal (mytoday.mobi), Lead Generation and as we set up
alternate payment channels, Paid Channels and Transactions. News is one of our most
popular services - reaching nearly 1.5 million, twice daily.
Summary: The Digital world of Internet and Mobile offer rich opportunities because of
their inherently interactive nature. What news media and digital content companies need
to do is to start thinking of them as platforms in their own right, rather than simply as
extensions of print or TV (which starts implying subsidisation). By building a right of way to

3. subscribers, they can create many more monetisation streams than just advertising. The
game has just begun!
Bio: Rajesh Jain is an entrepreneur from Mumbai, India. He is the Founder and Managing
Director of Netcore Solutions Pvt Ltd (messaging and security solutions,
and mobile data services), and have made a number of investments in
various companies as part of his own fund (Emergic Venture Capital). He
had earlier set up IndiaWorld, India’s first Internet portal which was
launched in 1995, which was acquired by Sify in November 1999 for USD
115 million (then, Rs 499 crore). He blogs at Emergic.org
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