Why my mom 1.0 hates your web 2.0

The end of June saw the launch of the latest product from NDTV Convergence's stable, which, for some odd reason has been called 'No Gyan." Ostensibly, the name is the conveyor of some cool quotient that is lacking in others. Maybe it is even a take on the famous Sprite campaign that said "Sprite bujhaye pyaas, baaki sab bakwaas." The mysterious reasons behind the branding of the site notwithstanding, the one thing that stands out in the product is the thinking (rather, the lack of it) is an unambiguous sad reflection and continuation of the scourge of using users/readers nothing but page view fodder.

While I am singling out the website for the lack of a specific purpose for its existence beyond attracting the leering clickstanders of the Internet as an easy shortcut to advertising-driven profit, the malaise is an industry-wide one, where product development is a cursory visit in the morning to Techcrunch and Mashable to find the latest horizontally transitioned, dissolved and blended JQuery-driven web 2.0 shiny-bells-and-whistles product as the essential amount of 'thought' that gets screen-captured and copy-pasted wantonly into the waiting arms of a Photoshop layer.

Mind you, it is not like there is no money being made out there because of it. There is a fair bit of it being made, but the trouble is that the fun and games won't last for long. After all, you can amass inventory and flog it across the zillion advertising networks that are there, but the CPM model does not scale in terms of stellar revenue growth month-on-month. The new trick -- of CPC -- is useless on sites with generic content and even then the content has to be discoverable in the first place, which in itself is a problem these days. That leaves you with selling fixed spots on the properties as the only way out. Which is exactly when realization says "guten morgen" to you, with the whiff of strong coffee in tow and a newspaper that has a screamer headline (in 72 point bold, no less) which reads "blind spot."

Recently, I received a rather interesting email that showed the latest Comscore study saying said that Indian internet usage had gone up yet again. But it was a subject matter of great intrigue that nobody could figure out who or what is driving the new usage. There is, of course, organic growth in almost every property out there (you have to have REALLY messed it up to not have that), but growth as a factor of overall usage growth is dismal and that is what is spooking everyone. There are exceptions, though, to that observation. Properties with heavy consumer-facing, unique-view-driven features are growing at a faster rate than generic content-driven properties, but there too the problem is the same, that inventory growth need not translate into revenue growth commensurate with the latter. So, what really went wrong?

Hit-and-run usage: The Indian Internet never grew up from the age of the eyeball bandits that spanned the early years. The mentality and thinking are pretty much the same all over the place. We have a three step routine which is hardwired into the stakeholder cranium: 1) Get the eyeballs 2) Monetize! monetize! monetize! 3) Profit!

In an era where everyone is desperately looking for better user engagement that should ideally lead to better profiling and targeting, Indian Internet is busy stomping on time's rewind button, trying to look cool wearing floral prints and bellbottoms like the 70s never went out of fashion and wonder rather naively, "why is everyone looking funny at me?"

Why is it that we don't like to engage our users in any meaningful fashion, beyond treating them as page view fodder? The reasons vary, but the primary source of the problem is from the old school eyeball bandit line of thinking. Secondly, it is hard work actually engaging users. It necessitates the acceptance of the fact that you may have been wrong in your thinking. It also necessitates the acceptance of the fact that a million people clicking a button in the wrong way is actually the right way, in contrast to your idea of the right way which was accepted by a sum total of four people in the senior management.

User engagement is 90% learning and 10% implementation and we in India tend to look down upon our audience. At one of my previous jobs I'd once told the COO, "we have a monopoly on the dumb Indian internet audience, they keep coming back day in and day out even if we are practically slapping them on their faces every time they come to our website." The trouble with hit-and-run usage is that it gives you little value, incremental or otherwise. You will have a great deal of trouble, with such usage, in monetizing the traffic beyond the standard display advertising route.

Web Two Point Uh-oh: Web 2.0 really is the 'unbiased' of our times. Did Web 2.0 cause you to do your taxes differently? Did the way business has been done on the planet change because there are 50 tutorials on JQuery that pop up on Del.icio.us on a daily basis, which tells you for 9000th time how to do a 'better' accordion using Javascript? Admittedly, there are plenty of amazing looking web 2.0 websites there, but if you try and find more than the obvious five or six, chances are that you will struggle to find others that are in the black.

The fact of the matter is that even web 15.0 won't change the way business is done and there are not too many ways to do that right now. From the snazziest to the ugliest website, the basic principle that rules them all is the same: you need to make more money from what you run, than what you spend in keeping it running. Of course, there are exceptions like Youtube and Twitter, but exceptions don't make the rule. A good UI and the web 2.0 feeling is not a replacement for a credible business model and that applies to everyone from start ups to established companies.

Quite a lot of the products that we see being rolled out in India are nothing but copy-paste jobs of products from the West that have no reason to exist other than the fact that DHH unleashed Ruby on Rails on the unsuspecting masses (add JQuery, Mootools, Prototype and cheap hosting with Dreamhost to the list) with nary a thought given to how on earth they'll ever make money in their lifetimes. Shown blinking/fading windows and a thousand spectacular effects like the W3C suddenly decided to make Fourth of July fireworks a markup language by itself, we fall flat on our faces like a 17-year-old girl looking at her first Tom Cruise poster and say with bated breath, "I gotta have that!"

Once the product is finished, the secondary thought process starts: "well, we made this umm.. thing, now, how do we make money off this?" Which is how the sales teams get involved in the madness and after a couple of quarters with varying success, the realization dawns that, well, nobody wanted the product anyway. Cue in the customary lolcat moment: Oh Hai, wes have solved problems nobody haz. Which, is a cardinal sin for any product. Actually, we don't even care if there is a problem that needs to be solved. All that matters is that the four wise men have decided for a billion what is right, based on a template that has nothing to do with the billion for whom the product is being released. Which brings us to the next point.

The Indian English Internet: I think it is quite okay to assume that 90% of the products that have been released on the Indian Internet has been for the English speaking audience. A tiny percentage of the websites listed on Alexa's India Top 100 has content outside the confines of the English language and that is where the major trouble starts.

Even in India's urban areas, beyond the obvious up-market areas, English is not the lingua franca of choice. Depending on which part of the country you are at, the local player is the king anywhere you go. So, it is only natural that even with a growing number of users, the usage of English Internet is not going to grow at the same rate. The more you focus on releasing properties like nogyan, with which most of the audience won't have any resonance beyond the leering quotient, the more you will encourage the hit-and-run usage. And thus you complete the vicious cycle.

Rise of the Locals: Even those who do local language content and products tend to leave it at doing UI-level improvements or to just do translation of already available English content. There is no focus or attempt that is being made to customize products or offerings to suit or meet regional sensibilities. We really have a major bit of learning to do here from the retailers. Every market segment and sub-segment behaves differently according to demographics and geographies.

Age of Federation: Just as how there really is no one concept of 'India,' there is really no singular template that can work across India, especially in content and products that are focused at the local level. The eventual rock star in the Indian Internet market would be someone who is just a federation of many smaller successful properties since the market growth will also result in fragmentation as soon as the former happens.

This requires companies to think at an even greater micro-level while being able to piece together the picture at the macro level. How many of us are doing this right now? Can't imagine many of us are and this is one major opportunity for a new player to come in and change the existing dynamic.

Current players cannot afford to take their eyes off what they are up to right now since they are heavily invested into it. A product like nogyan may linger on for a year or more, but it still requires effort and resources to keep it going, which takes away resources from new and potentially useful products. Since the major cost these days in doing original content is the content itself, it is fairly possible that a well planned assault on the local front is something the big players won't be able to thwart.

The .txt Generation: Those who ignore the 13-year-old hunched over his/her phone shooting out an average of 70 messages in a day will do so at their own peril. In the next 10-15 years we witness such drastic changes in consumption patterns of both information and modes of content discovery that almost every rule and every norm that we take for granted today will make no sense at all. The current business models, from print to online, in India are heavily dependent on the old rules.

Honestly, we don't have any clue about that generation, other than that we have no clue about what they are and how they identify with things. What is already known is that they consume and share things at a much greater rate than what we have ever done. Once they overtake our generation as of the dominant market share demographic, products also would need to change accordingly. Right now, nobody is doing that.

We have to observe, learn and adapt. Else, we'll be witness to our own gradual demise.

business, business, business models