Update:
Rajesh Jain, not surprisingly, disagrees with our opinion that NayaNaya and MyToday.mobi are publishing content. What matters is not how we interpret what MyToday is doing, but how publishers view it. Let’s see how they react to how ads are removed from their content.
Jain says that Transcoding (which we’ve explained below) is an intermediate solution, and the problem with RSS feeds is that they provide links to pages which are not mobile friendly. He suggests that sites create a separate RSS feed with breaking news that link to their mobile versions, or if they “want RSS feeds dropped from the NayaNaya sources, we will do that also.”
Original story: Rajesh Jain’s MyToday, better known for its editorialised push SMS services, has launched a series of WAP based portals, focused on the breaking news genre. NayaNaya features separate mobile-ready sites, covering News, Business, Cricket, Technology, Movies etc, writes Jain. The content on NayaNaya.mobi is being aggregated from various sites, apparently using RSS feeds.
What I found most interesting about MyToday.mobi and NayaNaya.mobi, is that they’re displaying the entire content from a particular article, within the MyToday ecosystem. Take a look at content from Rediff, Afaqs, and Glamsham. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if entire articles (not excerpts) are stored within the MyToday ecosystem, then it is essentially publishing the content.
Repurposing content for the mobile and hosting it at MyToday is a one-size-fits-all strategy – it’s a platform role like the one being played by YouTube. This aggregation also reminds me of Google News, and the court case with Belgian newspapers. A problem arises from the fact that some media companies would prefer that the links redirect to their mobile sites, so they can monetize that traffic. Rediff and IBNLive are possible examples.
While some media organizations might be fine with their content being made available on the mobile, others will not, particularly if MyToday mobile gets monetized. NayaNaya has space for an advertisement – see this CNBC story, and the “Top Ad” space.
Possible Solutions:
— MyToday can offer to just host the content, much like YouTube, and offer a revenue share to publishers.
— Or, as a value add, MyToday can actually help power branded mobile versions for some of these publishers, for a revenue share deal, and a monthly maintenance fee. At present July Systems is providing mobile website solutions to media companies like HT Media, NDTV and Network18.
— Redirect to those sites which have a mobile version
Note for MyToday: the following pages for Business Standard and IBNLive did not load.