All the world's on video

The number of Indians visiting video portals is rising, but not fast enough for the promoters.

Among other things, 2007 will be remembered as the year when video-sharing sites debuted "" and disappeared. Close to 20 such sites appeared on the horizon in 2006-07 and today, as many as eight of these are down or off-the-web.

But even as video-sharing sites like Suckoobai.com, iTube.com, Toad, Wisdomindia.tv and others are down, new ones like 26thjanuary.com have surfaced, looking to strike gold.

Ujjawal Bhardwaj launched 26thjanuary.com around 20 days ago and claims to already have 7,000 registered users and more than 1.5 million hits on it. So how does he intend to survive in the market?

"We have structured our revenue model on advertising from Google (that is, money earned from Google Adwords) and companies who want an online campaign." The main difference between 26thjanuary.com and other sites, he asserts, is that it caters to Indians around the world with content in most Indian languages.

Bhardwaj, who runs five more websites like IndianJobsonline.com, MarriageExpress.com and so on, is anything but a novice. "We have not introduced any content-share partnerships in India yet but we are looking to share revenue [with content partners] on a 70:30 basis."

"If one can get appealing content, then there is a lot of advertisement money lying around. Till then, it is a fight to survive," says Sandeep Shrivastava of Yahoo India.

Stymied by the low numbers of Indian Internet users, especially broadband connections (just three million out of 25 million active Internet users), video-sharing sites can only hope things will get better next year.

Typically, Google, Yahoo, Rediff, MSN are the big-wigs of the video-content industry, besides startups like VideoChutney, Meravideo, ApnaTube, Infeedia, VideoCurry, AapkaVideo and Canaravideo.

These measure individual page views for each item submited "" be it a photo, video or animation. "From that number, the site calculates the percentage of hits it accounted for, subtracting the site's expense to host the video (usually about 20 per cent). The number remaining is the profit, split equally between the site and the content creator," explains Rajnish, digital marketing head, MSN India.

The problem with most Indian video-sharing sites is that they have become a place to post TVCs, borrowed content like funny animals or Bollywood song clippings. A few like Layfile.com, Chatpatavideo or Youclipit.net have scaled the popularity charts owing to their adult content.

Points out Rajnish, "MSN's Soapbox is hoping to shape up as a place to do full-length sitcoms or interviews in India."

MSN, like Google's YouTube, also sells keywords to marketers so that when a user searches for a particular word, say "India" or "Shilpa Shetty", the video results that come up can be used as viral marketing plugs. A marketer bids for relevant keywords, with bids averaging between $5-$25.

Manish Agarwal, vice-president marketing, Rediff India, highlights how it hopes to make money. "Once a video is uploaded on iShare (Rediff's video portal), advertisers can choose where their ads will appear with a video [pre-roll, post-roll, banners]."

Online video campaigns for brands are also on the cards. Rediff also introduced "Voice of Rediff", based on Zee's Sa Re Ga Ma Challenge 2007, where aspiring singers can upload video and audio files on iShare to qualify for the show.

Says Agarwal, "We are not making money from this tie-up, but we intend to use similar marketing tie-ups, co-branded video promotions, to create a steady revenue stream for the site."

New entrants like 26thjanuary.com remain optimistic too. Bharadwaj, who's made only $200 from the site until now, loves to cite the example of YouTube, which too wasn't making much money three years ago, "but once the company had a big user-base, it sold the business to Google for a whopping $1.6 billion."

Cheered by ComScore's latest report, which says that 52 per cent of online Indians visit entertainment websites and a same number also visit social-networking websites, Indian video portals are hoping to make it big, some day.