Twenty20

On a talk show on NDTV about Twenty20 vs. Test cricket, Imran Khan made an interesting point. Cricketers, he said need talent, technique and temperament to do well in Test cricket. Twenty20 takes technique and temperament out of that equation. It brings out the sheer force of raw talent which is in abundance in both India and Pakistan. But by that yardstick I wonder how New Zealand reached the semis. They are one team who have plenty of character and spirit but can’t be accused of being too talented.

Where are the Cricket Magazines?

Just before the excitement around the Manic Monday win (I admit, it does sound better Sizzling Sunday), I was talking to some friends about why cricket magazines in India have never taken off in a big way in India. By all reckoning, it should have been a through and through winning format. There are a huge number of people passionate about cricket, there’s a high level of understanding of the nuances of the game and a national cricketing calendar that is so packed there will never be slag issues.
A lot of people and media companies tried to have a go at a cricketing magazine. Some serious money has been invested and some big names have been signed on to write for those magazines - but all of them have come a cropper. It’s so puzzling we spent a round of drinks debating why it should have been so. Here are some hypotheses that came up:
1. Given that most people have a general aversion to reading, would they pay 20 or 30 bucks every week to read – even if it is about something they are as mad about as cricket. Despite it being free, I doubt a large number (read – commercially viable) of resident Indians visit the sites like Cricinfo or Rediff on non-match days; I suspect a substantial number of visitors to these sites are NRIs who pine for cricket in baseball country.
2. With the surfeit of news and analysis on everything related to cricket on television and newspapers, there is nothing left to be said in magazines.
3. We love to discuss match statistics and minutiae which tend to lose their impact if the immediacy is lost and a lag of a week could render them completely irrelevant.
4. Our affair with cricket is very temperamental – notice the plummeting ratings after the West Indies World Cup and now the T20 ratings. Maybe magazine economics don’t allow for such wild swings in circulation and the resultant unpredictability of ad revenues. (A related point - this unpredictability is a headache for cricket broadcasters too; but the upside on television when India does well is so high that it possibly makes up for the downsides when we sink.)
5. A big source of excitement for sports magazines in the pre-satellite TV days were glossy action pictures. But other than photography connoisseurs, I don’t think many will be interested in those in today’s age of stump cameras and slow motion replays.

Whatever the reason, just for the sake of some good writing I hope a cricket magazine makes good in India.

Does Manic Monday sound better than Sizzling Sunday. Was that the
reason for scheduling the finals of the first Twenty20 championship at
a glorious time of 2 PM local time on a monday afternoon. I am sure
there is a reason. Would love to know what that is.

Free Free Free

Two news items caught my attention yesterday. One, the New York Times made its online content completely free (parts of it were accessible only to paid subscribers till now) and separately, I read that Rupert Murdoch may consider making WSJ online free.

I found this interesting because both these sites (especially WSJ) were generally regarded good examples of generating revenues through subscriptions. Hence this puts into question the business model that was held by many as a beacon of hope for mainline media in the new space – a model that ensured they lived in this online world after their imminent collapse in the offline one. There are I think three main reasons why this model doesn’t work – and irrespective of how well it is couched, the fact is these newspapers are going free because not enough people are paying up.

1. People consume online media by verticals. Unlike offline newspapers or magazines, people don’t read all or even most sections of online newspapers or magazines. They tend to skim and read only those verticals or sections which are of interest to them. It’s difficult to get a consumer to pay for the entire newspaper portal if he / she is going to read only the sports section or the technology section – and they’d rather read that stuff on sites dedicated to those subjects.

2. Most of the traffic to such sites is actually generated by links provided through search engines. And somebody who is directed to a site through such links is unlikely to subscribe just to read a single article of interest at that point in time.

3. A lot of bloggers refrain from linking ‘subscriber access only’ sites. This further reduces the number of possible visits to the sites.

As difficult as it may be for old media owners to reconcile to giving content for free, that’s probably the only way for them to remain relevant in today’s information-rich era. Meanwhile, they’ll just have to keep trying to discover more ways to monetize their content, other than advertising.

Going Going Gone

Just read that frustrated by the political mess in the country, some frustrated soul had put Belgium up for auction on eBay and the bid topped at $17 million before it was stopped by authorities. Guess Shilpa Shetty was ahead of times when she proclaimed "main aai hoon UP Bihar lootne."

On Blogs

I've come across a lot of articles recently on blogging and mainstream media. Mukul Kesavan has written about this in the Telegraph and Amit Varma, whose blog and writings in the Mint I greatly admire has added some very good perspective on the subject.

In addition to those, I believe blogging is about expressing points of views, discussing and having conversations. It’s never meant to replace mainstream media as we know it. Any media will have its own commercial constraints and thus not be able to do justice to the information needs of millions of individuals. Blogging steps in and offers information and perspectives which are by nature niche, appealing to a smaller number of interested people. To that extent communities tend to form around blogs and though each individual community may be too small to be serviced by a dedicated mainstream news magazine, it could be substantial enough to nurture a lot of blogs which feed off each other while dipping into the mainstream media. Exactly, the way this blog references two mainline newspapers and a blog, which in turn references many others.

I read this morning that the Economist once described Naomi Klein (of "No Logo" fame) as having all the “incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent”. Though I don’t quite agree with the sentiment, can’t help but admire the phrase.

Henry Bliss, RIP

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first American pedestrian
killed in a car accident. Henry Bliss was knocked by a cab in
Manhattan on Sept. 13, 1899. The cabbie wasn't named Alistair.

Where's That Needle

Ram forwarded me this post by Seth Godin who outlines yet one more huge opportunity for organising all the information in the world.

What Will We Search For?

Google is synonymous with search marketing, with almost all of its $10 billion plus revenues coming from that domain. And it has fine tuned the art of searching for anything from the arcane to the most mundane in a fraction of a second. But with stock market expectations not abating, how would Google leverage its search expertise to keep ahead?
With its AdWords algorithms, Google plays a central role in serving up relevant ads for any queries users throw at it. This has been further enhanced with other services like mail and image search which is an additional opportunity for Google to place ads relevant to the key words our in our Gmail inbox. All of which is not new. What could take this way further is the gPhone – rumours of which are flying fast and thick.
According to a recent Piper Jaffray study on the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, search is the second most commonly used application on the Internet (after mail). More importantly, it is expected to grow almost three times the current size, to about $45 billion by 2011. And two of the key trends are going to be an explosion of new technologies in the search area and increasing “local search” opportunities. Imagine how potent Google’s search technology will be on a mobile platform and how it can exponentially increase the pool of local advertisers.
One of the key reasons for Google’s success as an advertising platform actually comes from thousands of scattered, small businesses peddling everything from timeshare to VHS cassettes of Citizen Kane played backwards (don’t ask me – somebody seems to want it). Most of these businesses find it far more efficient to advertise specific offers to a tightly defined base online (people who like watching movies backwards?!), rather than spend millions of bucks advertising on newspapers and television. In that sense, Google has actually opened up a new, hitherto fragmented market. Now imagine how much more widespread that that can be if the service can be migrated to a mobile platform. How many more local businesses will make use of advertising that is targeted at a tightly defined user base – either geographically (Lamington Road, Mumbai) or by mobile usage. And if that gPhone is priced at around $100 (as the rumour mills suggest), the Piper Jaffray numbers will suddenly start looking very small indeed.

10.30 PM Headline News

It’s 10.45 PM now and mindless channel surfing across four Hindi TV news channels tells me that:

Mangetar ki chaahat . . . saheli ka balaatkaar

Shouhar ki khaaish . . . biwi ki blue film

Ek missed call . . badal gayi jindagi uski

Videsh se lauta . . . flyover kaa lutera

Thankfully, a fourth channel had sports news so I learnt that Sachin ne sanyaas lene se inkaar kiya.

That is how India kept abreast with news, today.
Don’t worry. Be happy. Aur bhi gam hain jamaane mein.