on survival, running google adsense and other trivial matters

Hello,

Five people so far have questioned the survival of nautanki.tv. Two of them have called us desperate and one has suggested in a private email things that I do not wish to discuss here!! Such passion.

In the normal course of life I would not bother about these quibbles at all and not even bother to respond, but this morning one of the junior most guys here asked me and I quote "Sunil, you pay the publishers on time, pay the content guys on time, even the salaries from day one have been on time, then why do these guys - the bloggers doubt the survival of the company?" I had to answer and here are the simple home truths about nautanki.tv

1. We run adsense ( and we will run adsense forever ) on our anchor portal not because that gets us money. The money that we get from there would not cover even the chai costs. We run it because I personally admire Google. They changed the way advertising was done everywhere and made it possible for a new business model to emerge. We run Adsense because when agencies site target www.nautanki.tv for their campaigns we are able to go back to the clients and talk to them about doing business with them. :) Which translates into revenue for everyone - including the publishers.
2. We run it on the website and not on the network of over 1500 websites. Had we done that we would have been able to rake in big money. But we are not desperate :). (by the way being desperate is a good state of mind to be in for a startup, it reminds you that resources have to be utilized better)
3. The nautanki.tv channels are primarily for video content. We (surprise! Surprise!) webcast original content. This content comes after the TVC and the TVC is incidental. The TVCs pay for the content, so far we have paid out of our pockets but someday the trend will change.
4. We created the network as a distribution medium for short format content, for documentaries and work that never gets visibility because the powers that be do not see value. We work with close to 200 film makers who now see nautanki.tv as an option to showcase their work and maybe make money. Did any of you guys know that documentaries that we webcast get viewership from around the world? and that we single handedly give more viewers to the independent film makers than all the OTHER guys put together.
5. Autoplay was a demand that came from the publishers. We will make available both options with and without autoplay soon. Publishers make money when there are paying ads on the network and when their traffic clicks to watch the content end to end.
6. We think we have gone beyond the point where there are any doubts about whether we will survive or not. We are well funded. We do not believe in making announcements about how much and from where. The proof of the pudding is, dear sirs, in eating it, well in this case you do your bit and get to the Rs 10000 mark and we will send that nice little cheque to you with a thank you note. We have done that for the last 5 months and have created a mini ecosystem by that virtue alone.


So there am done explaining.

So when people talk about alexa ranking (by the way today we are at 2976 in India)we do not know what to tell them for they do not understand what nautanki.tv is all about. When they say we are desperate we smile and get back to work. Rome they say was not built in a day.

Cheers