WSJ - Wall Street Journal (yes the one that mr murdoch wants to buy)
AIA - Asia Innovation Awards
2007 - thats this year
nautanki.tv - a company innovative enough to be eligible to be invited for the WSJ AIA 2007.
Need I say more? No guarantees that we will win anything but then we are getting noticed by the majors.
We were informed yesterday that we did not make it to the RH Asia 100. Reason given was that we did not have a track record and were only 6 months into operations when we were nominated. It does seem we need to grow up as a business.
Thank you everyone for your support and emails and comments. Next year we promise.
Cheers
Sunil R Nair
A dear friend of ours plans to do a story on nautanki.tv in a prominent magazine and the title that she has planned for the story is "Pirates of Shivaji Park"! For those of you who do not know what Shivaji Park means or are unaware of the cultural importance of this open ground in Central Mumbai - Shivaji Park is where major political parties hold their rallies and protests in Mumbai. Dr Ambedkar - the social reformer's birth and death anniversaries are celebrated at this location. It serves as the meeting place for hundreds of love birds starved of privacy and these love birds are looked down by the hundreds of upper middle class citizens - majorly the last true representatives of the 'Marathi Manoos' - the Marathi man - of Mumbai.
nautanki.tv operates some 100 meters away from THAT Shivaji Park. It is kind of a skunk operation. The building is residential and the office had an old bone surgeon's clinic (we still have a ceiling anchor which kept the xray machine in place). We have wooden stairs and the floor of the office has a very faded rexine covering thats keeps peeling off. Like true startups everyone shares the space and everyone is everywhere. If you need a place to sit then you need to come in early and hijack someone else's chair. Amar Singh (am not joking) our VP Pantry makes great tea and we get requests from very known people about the secret of his recipe.
Somewhere along the last three months we have begun to function like a Pirate operation. We have done what others take ages to do in an operation that has been quite and stealthy.
The only thing missing are the pirate bandanna and the skull flag. Some of our guys are getting that ready too. Soon Shivaji Park will have a huge Pirate flag in front of one of it's buildings.
watch out you your out there!
hey folks worried about the nautanki.tv ranking on alexa.
as of 8 august we are 75669 in world ranking up from 1,036,058811719 three months back.
India ranking is now upto 2809 up from 2976 on 6th august.
ram
nautanki.tv - our little venture is now amongst the top 200 finalists of RedHerring Asia 100 Awards
We have come a long way. Hope we do win the RHAsia 100 award now.
Sunil R Nair
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
hi
This is my first post here on this blog. I have been told to blog here often enough but i always shied off citing a number of reasons.
but the real reason was i did not have anything to talk about.
NOW i have.
Nautanki.tv is now moving. The environmental elements of content providers, publishers and finally the long and eagerly awaited advertisers are here. Our upgrade to the player and its associated back end which targets the Advertising Demographically, Geographically and Contextually has paid off.
The next upgrade will be to handle the Immense traffic build up with is now in TB's a day. and no i don't mean tuberculosis i mean Tera Bytes yes BYTE not bit.
We are enabling clustering, pumping up RAM, Quadrapuling the bandwidth, tighter code, a better interface for all, etc etc.
On the whole we shall be shortly migrating to version 2.0.
what does it mean to the user, publisher,content guys and advertisers.
A better system, more focused on deliverables , less procedural hassles. and most importantly more money and more bang for the buck.
nautanki.tv is now storming up the rankings and its on its way to beating competition and overtaking them in the viewership stakes.
But as usual we have our own set of doubting Thomases.
but all these doubts are because of not really understanding what nautanki.tv is.
a lot of people assume that we are an advertising network.
more than a few think that we are another you tube clone.
a few even think that we play naughty videos.
but what is nautanki.tv???
Its Television Online. Just like you have television channels on you television we are Television on the net. and just like television we are recovering the cost of making and webcasting the content by playing ads.
the difference is that the advertiser can have a better engagement with the viewer. Its like talking to an audience of ONE and a call to action with a click which can get them a client in a jiffy.
but nautanki.tv bigger role is enabling the repressed creative talent in this country to get an audience to tell their story using an audio visual platform.
we are doing for film makers what all the popular talent competitions on TV are doing for the singers and dancers.
Also there have been a lots of bouquets and brickbats because of the Auto Play feature being enables.
There was this one comment i read somewhere
"The video starts playing and visitors get diverted from the topic and start watching the ad."
When will people get it that people also watch the content. Nautanki is like an RSS feed of video content on your site. It ads value for to your site. We have found that our publishers have had in increase in visitors by 30% month on month since they have added a nautanki.tv video feed
continuesssss......
Hello,
It has been sometime since the last blog post. There has been too many things going on and time has been at a premium. The last four saturdays have been days when one has woken up at six in the morning, got ready and driven into office to ensure that things that were pending from the week do not spill over into the next week. Gone are the days of leisurely coffee and a breakfast with time.
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We now have 1500+ video feeds on our system. Everyday we get requests for additional features, solutions for tech problems and "mera paisa kabhi milega" answers. The most curious has been the surge in people wanting to join nautanki.tv as partners or as employees. A few have taken it upon themselves to write in daily with suggestions and ideas on how nautanki.tv can become the next Google, Microsoft, Youtube, Viacom, NewsCorp and so on. Ideas and suggestions are welcome, they help us know that we are on the right track, but emails that tend to be veiled threats, "I was dreaming for as 'CONSULTANT-PARTENER' with NTV, but ball is in yr court now" tend to get tiring. We sometimes offer some of the more enthusiastic publishers a chance to be our affiliates. And they tend to do everything other than do what they are supposed to do.
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We have advertisers finally on our network - remit2india, ebay and ikobo have started their campaigns. This will mean more money for publishers and content providers. Lets hope more come as time goes by. Publishers have to remember that they get paid only when there are paid ads in the network, and that takes time. Please do remember that a new medium will take time to be accepted. After all you guys are part of something that has never been tried before anywhere.
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Our new player went live a couple of weeks ago. We have intelligence in the player - IP targeting, content sense, click through trackers and a few never befores have been put into the player itself. And like any other company we have had people writing back saying they love the player or they hate it. Most hate its are due to the autoplay feature. We promise to take a final stand on the autoplay feature within the next month.
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Alexa Alexa do you see us now? We are crawling up the much followed alexa rankings. Does that help the people who are skeptical? Would you eat your words and humble pie if nautanki.tv reaches the top 100 websites in India? It did not matter to us for we knew what we were saying but then sometimes we too get emotional when people start calling us names and doubt our credentials. Thank you Ram for making this possible.
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We also have a small social network experiment live now. Test drive it please and let us know
As our community of web publishers increase everyday, we are discovering the ways and means in which nautanki.tv's feeds are being used to generate video views. One can simply cut and paste the video feeds onto the web pages and hope that people click on the play button and watch the content, but thats a very lazy way of using this powerful medium. Here are a few tips and ways in which a publisher can increase the video views on his / her web pages and thereby translate the traffic that comes to their webpages into revenue.
Tip #1: Don't embed nautanki.tv videos on empty pages
It is bad karma! Empty pages will mean that no one would visit the pages, plus the nautanki.tv system will not know what to classify your page as, hence all you will see on your feed are public service ads that are run for free. Free ads do not make any money for anyone. It is always better to embed the video feeds on pages that have traffic, it increases the chance of someone clicking on the play button and watching the content. Embedding the content in relevant pages will mean that people will find relevance between what you have on the page and what is in the video. When they return they will be more inclined to click on the video window to see whats new. You might want to associate your content with whats available, for example if you are talking about a movie you might want to embed the movie review / Phillumwallah channel feed.
Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions
Write to us as many times as you want. It is a very rare day when one of us does not read the email and replies. Sophie our magic lady in customer services is prompt in taking up your cause and following up with the people at nautanki.tv. If you want to know more about the relation between your website and the kind of content we have, please feel free to write in to info[at]nautanki[.]tv . We also welcome your inputs on the kind of content that you want.
Tip #3: Play on the uniqueness of your content
Make people who read your website want to click on the video feeds by associating your content with the video, by subtling suggesting that they can see a video by clicking on a link etc. We have seen that unique content gets people to come more often and the more people coming onto your website would mean more are the chances of they wanting to see the videos.
There are many ways other than embedding the content onto webpages to increase the views on your feeds. The most popular seems to be sending out the embeds in an HTML page via email to people in your address book. Several of our publishers have been doing this regularly and have been benefiting from the results. You can also create newsletters which combine your website contents with videos from nautanki.tv and send it to people who subscribe to your newsletters. People have also been submitting links on digg, reddit etc and have increased the number of views. The ideas seem to be limitless.
As we grow and have a bigger family we will learn more innovations and innovative uses of our feeds. And we at nautanki.tv will keep sharing them with the publishers. Keep innovating and thank you for your support.
Patience, wasn't exactly one of my biggest virtues ever. I always loved interacting with others, working with a team and all of that but ironically, my short fuse always gave way. The one most important thing that I have learnt in the past 4 to 5 months is that being a channel producer is definitely not a cake walk. I was sooo damn wrong in thinking it would be easy.
Being a people's person is hard, dealing with them patiently is tougher and then getting work done through all of this is close to getting a glimpse of god!!!
Okay, so I'm exaggerating, but the point is that trying to switch between mental states so that you get along with every member of your team is next to impossible. Trying to do this everyday-- forget it!. Here at nautanki.tv, we get a wide variety of people in all shapes and sizes with a very eclectic mental range. It's a lovely assortment :) but when I had to deal with it initially, this box of assorted chocolates did not seem too wonderful. I admit it. I have flown off the handle quite a few times- bruising, injuring and sometimes demolishing the egos of many of my hard working producers. (I hope I haven't got myself onto their hate lists please).
Well, It's difficult to always relate to everything that comes my way.... right??
But then when I have to say a flat NO to soo many nice ideas oozing out of these creative brains, it's the hardest! These geniuses come with concepts and their faces glowing like 1000w bulbs and when the ideas get rejected, their faces resemble one of those zero power lights. Truly heart breaking. It's these sights that have inspired me to venture into the unknown...... I am becoming patient... beat that! I am becoming more and more tolerant by the day :). In the process, I've realised the true value of my team. They are an awesome bunch... talented and enthusiastic. Now it's my duty to pull up my sleeves and collaborate these scattered thoughts together and help them execute it.
Even if that means that I have to deal with the craziest brains ever created.... I'm all for it!!
Hi guys,
Lets us know your favorite top ten shows in Nautanki.
You can let us know through the comment section :)
Adios
Prax
Alootechie published the most juicy part of nautanki.tv's online video consumption report - 85% of online video consumption in India happens from offices and paves way for a flurry of emails to nautanki.tv and two comments on last count on Alootechie itself that we (nautanki.tv) has shot itself in the foot by publishing the report, further adding that now systems admins (may the lord bless their souls) will ban all video sites including YouTube, etc.
Assuming that systems admins in organisations are all intelligent, one would think that they would have already done the needful long before our report. But the truth is that consumption still happens from offices. We think it is because organisations sometimes are nice and do let people chat and browse.
Fortunately for nautanki.tv it does not impact our viewership in any way. 98% of our video views comes from our network of video feeds on close to 1300 web properties. For example SaffronTrail.com is one such web property that has nautanki.tv feeds on its pages. Since the videos are played off so many pages it is not likely that all those pages would be blocked.
What fun!
Agencyfaqs has published nautanki.tv's report on online video consumption in India. "New Tube" it screams loud! Read it here They have called it a case study since it looked at the way video is consumed by nautanki.tv's audience. What everyone forgets is that the audience did not come to nautanki.tv the URL / website to watch the videos. They did it off whichever websites they were on. nautanki.tv has 1312 feeds live currently. The point that we are trying to make here is that even if nautanki.tv conducted the study, the viewing happened off other websites, where there is existing traffic. We feel that since the viewing was scattered over such a large base it gave us an accurate feel of the kind of content that is watched and we were able to measure the various factors that goes into good viewing.
If anyone is interested you can download the complete report here
Well this can be termed as a sequel to the earlier blog entry from Sunil.
Nautanki.tv is now consistently generating good traffic and Content Producers.
The first set of Content Producers were bachcha's who seemed hungry, but lacked temperament; the second encounter was with the experienced one's.. those who talked, discussed, analyzed, committed and never came back..one went back angry!!!
The third kind had the hunger to create and the knack to explore..they made loads of mistakes with their deliverables, but tuned and refined their act at the latter stage. Many of them were also Publishers and Users.
We also came across lots of short films made by 18-24 year olds. Amazing films, good visualization, technically short, but great effort nevertheless.
Its been fun working and interacting with these guys. Learning curve for all concerned, including yours truly.
Moving to the most important part- that of monetizing the efforts!! Nautanki.tv is on track and very soon we will see some good tractions on all pieces of art.
Cheers
Hello,
The most common calls to the nautanki.tv office is related now a days to the question 'when will i get paid'? Most of our enthusiastic publishers even call up at 8 am on a saturday and expect that someone would be insane enough to be available to answer the question. Mani called up from Kochi last Saturday and I just happened to have walked in all dressed to make a presentation (I am known to be insane since most days I am in office at eight or even earlier), had I been a little late he would have been treated to a very gruff Amar Singh ( no jokes here ) our man friday and unless you can manage to decipher the Nepalese laden Hindi, you will never figure out what he says. And our dear friend Mani would have gone back and said that nautanki.tv is a scam. (shudder).
To set the record straight we are not a scam, we pay on time and the following are the answers to most of your questions:
1. When do I get paid?
Answer: You get paid when your account reaches Rs 10000 in a calender month. In case you make Rs 12500 in a month then the amount payable to you is rounded to the nearest Rs 10000 multiple and the balance amount is carried forward to the next month.
2. When do the cheques reach me?
Answer: All cheques are written out between the 5th and 10th of the month. The cheques for May 07 would get written between 5th and 10th of June 07. The cheques are sent by courier ( DTDC or Blue Dart ) and usually reach the publishers by the 12th of the month.
3. When are the cheques payable?
Answer: Cheques are payable on the 5th of the following month. For example if your account reaches Rs 10000 in May, the cheques will be mailed out to you by the 10th of June and you can deposit them after the 5th of July.
4. Why the 30 day period?
Answer: There are several reasons for this period, the primary reason is that we assume that our advertisers would be nice and pay us within that period. If they do not we would like to have some breathing space. Please do remember we are a startup and we DO NOT have deep pockets.
5. When will all this information appear in the publisher accounts sytem?
Answer: We have a major system upgrade slated for this month and if Ram permits we will have the answers online.
In case you still have queries and want a human being to answer your questions please feel free to write to info[at]nautanki[.]tv and Sophie will reply as soon as she can.
Cheers
You know you are doomed when you sit in front of internet experts and talk till your mouth runs dry and the only reaction that comes by from the 'royal highness' is "What is your Alexa rank?". What to do? we are normally like this only!
Well nautanki.tv ranks at 424,097 on Alexa!!!
Must we run scared? or are we bothered? No actually. The reason is that Alexa counts traffic to a destination using the Alexa tool bar which is installed in a lot of browsers. Currently the number of browsers that have Alexa tool bar is a debatable point. So if you were to type in www.xyzabc.com - Alexaji will tabulate how many others have done the same and will rank you. Fair enough but not fair to nautanki.tv because 95% of our video segment consumption does not happen on nautanki.tv. it happens on the 1113 video feeds across the internet. These never register on Alexaji's counters. So we never figure anywhere close to other respectables.
We do however break into the top 100000 websites in the world when the media writes about us and people come visiting. When that happens they register as publishers and go away with a little bit of nautanki.tv in their lives and web pages.
And we - all 18 of us in Mahim, Mumbai smile and get back to more work.
Achuthan Kutty, former founder of India’s first Interactive Agency Bridge Over TW, has joined nautanki.tv in Bangalore. He will be heading Business Development and Alliances for nautanki.tv.
Achuthan has been one of the pioneers in the interactive media space in India and has been in the advertising business for the past 25 years. He comes with very strong media understanding as well as a strong business development and client servicing background.
Commenting on his new assignment, Achuthan said, “Interactive advertising has been my passion; however it has been downgraded to the level of a sales only channel with virtually everyone looking at the Interactive Agency with the same lenses as a Direct Sales Agent. Pushing this to the limit and having only responses as the metric for the most part is in many ways killing the industry and robbing it of its vitality. I was on the lookout for doing something quite different, but yet within the Interactive Space and the offer from Nautanki, fitted me like a glove. While it is a start up I have no doubt of the capabilities of nautanki.tv and my move is in a way symbolic of how much I believe in nautanki.tv’s capabilities and growth potential. Moreover the position is as a Consultant, which gives me the freedom to pursue other non conflicting interests. ”
Welcome Achuthan, lets do some nautanki together.
He is kind of blue, so his parents (srishti and priya) named him indigo. Very aggressive, he has head butted a female already - she died recently. He normally tends to hang around the sales area in the office and flares his plumes when he gets annoyed with someone interfering with his space.
Presenting Indigo - our very own mascot.
Very recently Digital Inspiration and WatBlog said almost identical things and I quote "This 400x350 Nautanki.tv widget can also be good source of revenue for regional language blogs (like in Hindi, Tamil, etc) where contextual advertising programs like Adsense do not perform so well."
Considering that almost 60% of the internet population in India do not consider English as their first language of choice, we expect to see a lot of action in this space. Lets face it most Indians are comfortable reading in their mother tongue. You will therefore find a Gujarati websites doing better than an English one and so on.
At the same time digital media buyers seem to ignore this fact and pretend to be catering to the English audiences.
nautanki.tv will very soon be activating the regional publishers programs with content created for their needs and advertising thats more local.
hi guys,
work in progress to make nautanki.tv, the worlds most progressive online platform in terms of participation.
on one hand, you have content/ film producers participating by displaying their work and monetise;
on the other hand you have viewer participation thru' various blogsites/ web properties wanting more
and finally u have brands participating to take their products closer to the tg.
i will liken it to a movement which is gaining grounds horizontally & vertically.
its great to meet sincere film producers/ content producers young n ol, so very passionate about their work and wanting people to watch their films,
its great to hear content producers reacting positively to every comments that are posted,
its great to read from people unknown who have posted their suggestions to make nautanki.tv better at every step.
cheers and thanks for all ur support
