CONTENT/CONTENT/CONTENT

30 Aug 2003

Kartavya/Sanjeev/Abhi,

CONTENT/CONTENT/CONTENT

Content is the King

See enclosed news cuttings. I have sent you several similar cuttings earlier too.

One thing is clear.

Having invested thousand of cores of rupee in rolling –out Mobile phone services, the service providers are desperately looking for some killer content which subscribers will pay for and which does NOT come under the purview/juris direction of TRAI/TDSAT/ govt. etc.

As far as voice talk is concerned it has become a commodity. Not only it is cheapest in India, worst part is, it is controlled by TRAI/TDSAT etc, for service-Providers, there is hardly any “profit” to be made in voice –talk. 

There is a cut throat competition and then there is the regulator who directs prices.

And huge bandwidths installed, have pushed up “fixed costs” & consequently the “Break-even volumes” for each service provider forcing round after round of price cuts.

This is an absolute “Lose/LOSE” situation for all service-providers.

Within a year there will be a huge “shake out/consolidation/ mergers & Acquisitions and only a few with deep pockets will survive.

In the meantime all of them those with deep pockets and those without are all scrambling to get hold of

CONTENT-PROVIDERS

Who can provide them with such useful content that their subscribers will be willing to pay for content for which they can charge fancy price without having to wrong about TRAI.

This is like drug price control of pharma industry.

O drug company wants to manufacture drugs whose prices are controlled / dio-tated by Drug controller (eg: Generic drugs).

They all want to manufacture only those patented drugs which are NOT covered by DPCO (Drug price Control Order)

Makes for obvious business-logic.

Cell phone service providers are in similar situation right now.

Either they quickly switch over a major part of their service to “Non-price controlled services or face closure/take-over

This is OUR opportunity.

Millions of jobseekers are desperately looking for info on “Suitable” jobs-in any part of the country.

If someone gives them “Sharp/focused/pinpoint” job/vacancy content, they would pay for it may be Rs. 25/month (Rs.1/- per day).

Especially if such content is delivered over a cheep device like a cell-phone as compared to a Rs. 25000/- PC & internet connection.

Surfing for job in cybercafé costs Rs, 15/- per hour which could as up to Rs. 200/400 per month (nearly same as monthly bill for a mobile)

We can deliver job search job alert content to these 15 million cell phone subscribers (of course first they would need to submit their resumes on RecruitGuru).

But, if we have to deliver this content over cell-phones we need to tie-up will service providers.

At RS. 30/month/subscriber (for delivering SMS job alerts, one per day), this translates into a revenue to service providers.

13 million x 30 = Rs. 390 million/month

                     = Rs. 39 crores/month

And this revenue is not subject to TRAI

I am sure, we can “Sell” this idea to service providers (-and, in the process, earn 10% i.e Rs. 2/3 crores per month) from this service of “Delivering Job Alerts as SMS.

I feel we should take up this project on TOP-PRIORITY (as far as development of software is concerned) before monster/Naukri gets in. 

They are already delivering Job-alerts as email even today I would be surprised if this idea (of delivering job alert as SMS) has not occurred to them so far.

We can think of giving out this as a lump-sum project to an outsider since our own developers are going to be too busy for next 2 months.

Let us discuss on Monday with Nirmit/SriRam & Raju