The guy is about to die and asks the guard

F*** You Paypal

“Everyone strives to reach the Law,” says the man, “so how does it happen that for all these many years no one but myself has ever begged for admittance?” The doorkeeper recognizes that the man has reached his end, and to let his failing senses catch the words, roars in his ear: “No one else could ever be admitted here, since this gate was made only for you. I am now going to shut it.”

The recent RBI restrictions imposed on Paypal just make you empathize with the story. You want to earn your country some foreign currency. You work you ass-off trying to get clients to pay you. You don’t have any trustworthy system, especially in a country which has half of its ministers accused in scams. Still by just working on wafer thin profit margin you get the client to pay you through paypal, and you realize that you can’t get more than 500 USD payment form him!! He may pay in installments with every transaction less than 500 ? Wrong, he can cancel the order after first installment.

Will RBI reimburse me for lost business? NO!

It is not that you are using money to fund terrorists or any other illegal activity. Our PAN card number is linked with the account, statements are available to be assessed, your purpose code has been entered. But no, Indian government doesn’t like you earning money.

It may seem in this rant that I am illogical and don’t care about laws and reasons behind those laws. But sadly that is not the case. The RBI in the name of security and power to safeguard “Indian interests” are really destroying the system.

Seeing from a accounts side; I pay 5 percent to paypal to receive money on my behalf, I get 90 percent of market exchange rate, from Paypal; when I have to buy software from outside India Paypal charges my credit card which further charges me 110 percent of market exchange rate. I know we believe in Keynessian theory where we will pay people to dig hole and then to pay to fill it and economy will revive; but why should i be made to bear all the expense when I am paying all the taxes imaginable there over every iota of thing. Leave aside the fact that I am left exhausted as I have to constantly waste my time in trying to transfer money form this account to other!

Thanks RBI, may you rot in hell increasing base points further .

Google Mantra

There is no denying Google has been a leader in the search space for almost a decade and all attempts from startups to big corporates have been either complete failure or feeble successes. This time Google have entered the social arena with their newest and by far the best attempt at social with Google+ to disrupt the current beat of champions namely Facebook and Twitter. The battleground is set across multiple devices and platforms. Google already has a big market share in mobile OS through Android. Microsoft and Facebook closeness might be fruitful for the latter to take advantage of users on upcoming Windows 8 mobile OS. Apple has already announced its plan to integrate Twitter on iOS 5. Google+ is definitely going to leverage its Android platform. Google might also start releasing versions of Google Chrome similar to Rockmelt which would have Google+ integrated all around the browser. But another very strong platform, on which Google has almost complete monopoly and nobody is talking about, is Google Search.

Google has started showing author images with articles on its search pages. The image of author is being fetched from Google Profile page. Image accompanying the search result is a definite boost to CTR. Every site, blog and portal; big or small will have no choice but to implement it. In very short time the SERPs (search result pages) will start looking like social pages with author images, +1 buttons and other social stuff.

Google Search Result Pages

But what strikes me most is how Google is forcing me or other webmasters to have a Google Profile Page. I cannot claim my ownership of the content I am producing without creating a Google Profile. I repeat, according to Google I am not an owner of MY OWN content until I create an account with Google.

This is something very similar to what Baidu has been doing in China, promoting its own sites through its search. Most of the time neutral results are only shown after first or second page in Baidu’s search result pages. Search is the biggest online advertising platform. Its neutrality and fairness toward search results is one of the biggest yardsticks in winning the trust of web searchers. Search engines are expected to show results based on the content of the sites and not based on whether the webmasters are active on social networks owned by the respective search engines. Why is it necessary to claim ownership of my own content through Google Profiles network? Why I can’t do it through my existing Twitter, Facebook or other network’s profiles page, which are already public?

Google is late to the social party. Their last attempts; Buzz and Wave have been failures. Facebook and Twitter have already been established as market leaders. Google understands this very well, that the features or usability might create initial buzz but to get into the mainstream they need to acquire users at rates much faster than what Facebook and Twitter have been doing in last few years. Somebody on Twitter rightly pointed out – “I am not going to move to Google+ until my wife and all my friends decide to do so.” Google+ needs to acquire social graph of the masses.

Google is done with politely inviting people. Now you are forced to join the social network otherwise your competitor is going to kick you in search results. And to protect yourself not only you will be joining Google+, you will have to share your content with your friends across Google+, which means you have to invite your friends to the new social network as well.

Social network essentially are build on two building blocks – Social Graphs and good content. Whichever social network can unearth the two blocks in better way will be the winner in the long run. People share interesting content on their favorite social networks. Look at your social timelines; the reason you spend so much time on social network is because your timeline is full of interesting content. Google will be forcing webmaster to first share their content themselves on Google+ and then request, plead or motivate their readers and friends to share it on Google+ more than other social networks.

Here is one suggestion to Google – don’t restrict or force users to Google Profile. Let them build their profiles wherever they want. Instead ask people to follow open standards protocol (www.ogp.me) and tag their content properly so that their profile and pictures can be included with the search results. Let people have the final say in deciding to use Google Profile, Facebook, Twitter, Gravatar or Disqus.

Let the web be free.

Back to the trip now…

The trip began way earlier than 24th of Feb. It was actually mid December last year when it all started with an almost 2 day long ordeal to book the flight tickets with Air Asia. We all guys at the Noida office took up the onus to book the cheapest international flight tickets ever known to mankind - We just had to be finger snapping fast because

- Firstly we were going for dime a dozen kind of deal on Air Asia and these deals go off really fast

- Secondly these deals are always a bait [Obviously we were well informed and we chose to fall for it because the deal was cheaper than the return fare to Mumbai on Spicejet - beat that!!]

- Thirdly there were a lot of details to be filled in and considering we had to coordinate between 2 offices - let’s just say they weren’t easier to come by.

Trip details

What : 3 days & 4 nights of awesomeness

Who : Insta’Rockers’

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Day One : The date with the jets!

The most exciting day for all of us..everyone was waiting for the awesome to happen as we land. Guess what? it did happen! Our majority junta was flying for the first time…Imagine the excitement when you have 35 odd folks out of which 95% have never boarded a flight and rest 5% have never boarded an international one.

Needless to say it was an experience to fly with a group of 35 odd folks on the same flight…people were just so thrilled that they were on their toes as soon as the seat belt sign went off.

The amazing journey had a really painful ending…imagine the plight of a group which had traveled across the northern India [Shimla - Delhi] fighting cold, mountains and motion sickness…than spent the whole night traveling into the economy class of a budget airline with absolutely no leg room. After so long a journey what we all really craved for was some private time in the bathroom..but no! we had to spent at least 2 more hours in the hotel lobby because it wasn’t time yet for people to check in(according to the arrogant staff on the hotel reception desk)

Anyhow things rolled out fast and after persistent efforts from Rishi and Ankit we were able to get the rooms allocated to us by 3:00 PM (They pulled it off in less than an hour). Everyone was dead tired and we just decided that we will all be dining together in the evening today and we all went to our rooms.

We went out for dinner to a beach side restaurant near Patai Cenang [The most famous beach of Langkawi]…had a quick meal (primarily pizza…rice..pasta & garlic bread) and decided to walk on the beach.

Watching the sea in its full glory can really be a humbling experience.

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Day Two : Around langkawi in a day!

This was the day where we all hung out together and went to see the places together…The whole gang was broken down into 5 teams and each team was designated a driver who was responsible for ferrying the people from Spot ’As’ to ‘Bs’

We chose to travel to the most touristy locations on this day like ‘The Underwater World’, ‘Oriental Village’, ‘Cable Cars (Sea level to an altitude of 800 metres in flat 10 mins) & ‘Amazing Sky Bridge (Just for the sake of information its the same bridge where the climax scene from the movie ‘The Don’ was shot).

Cable car ride was really the highlight of the day…the view was really breathtaking; one could see forests, mountains, beaches, waterfalls, sea and the clouds. It was a perfect moment to forget the problems and simply get lost in the view.

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Day Three : To each his own!!

This was the most wild day for the most of us..We were let loose in a foreign country where there weren’t any cops to threaten us or traffic to stop us.

This was the most creatively spent day for all of us…Some of us chose to indulge into water-sports…others into luxury cruises [dirt cheap I tell you] and leftovers like me - who were stuck with the wanderlust and just decided to do a quick road trip around the island and making sure to stop at all the beaches and finishing up our quota of beer for the whole year.

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Day Four : Return of the kings!

Finally after 3 amazingly well spent days we had to come back..and with heavy hearts we bid good bye to a really nice island & its natives (Its the people which make any place awesome and we had some really amazing experiences to take back home this time).

We had done it all in the small amount of time we had with us…looked at some sights, bought souvenirs, interacted with the locals, checked out all the possible places to be seen…I would really recommend Langkawi as a holiday destination..it has some really amazing people & places. Moreover its cheaper than taking a trip to Goa.

We had to work together to find locations, places to eat or just to locate our own people - I must say, it wasn’t easy but everyone managed to arrive on time - everytime.

It was quite challenging to coordinate a big group and meet the schedules…but we did it! We as a group managed to stick to our deadlines without missing a single flight or a taxi ride.

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Lesson’s learnt from the trip!

1. You don’t really need to know too much English in Malaysia- Malay people don’t know it either

2. Its a pain to not to honk while driving…after all its an integral part of growing up in any city of North India

3. Its impossible to survive as a vegetarian [Hats off to 90% of our group :D]

4. There are some places on this earth where Beer & Petrol are cheaper than Water

5. There is always an option to hire a travel agent but than you won’t have the stories to tell

6. Don’t pack too much, especially clothes..why? you don’t end up wearing half of them.

7. When hungry - walk to a local store and get cuppa noodles…they taste ridiculously delicious when you are hungry.

8. Indian restaurants outside India suck!, they are over-hyped and the most expensive ever!!

9. Do not trust the Pizza from a local restaurant - it could very well turn out to be a cheese spread over a ‘Poppadom’

More Pictures Coming Soon!!

What is long tail?

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According to Wikipedia - The Long Tail or long tail is a retailing concept describing the niche strategy of selling a large number of unique items in relatively small quantities – usually in addition to selling fewer popular items in large quantities. The concept was popularised by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 Wired magazine article. The distribution and inventory costs of businesses successfully applying this strategy allow them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of a reduced number of popular items. The total sales of this large number of “non-hit items” is called the Long Tail.

Why is long tail important to content business?

Thanks to technology and social adaption; search is getting smarter and social media is getting stronger every day. This is making the long tail of content yet more longer, and the trend will surely continue to grow. Search and social are good in helping people find content in long tail, but not in providing content to the long tail.

Why you are not making money from the long tail?

Almost 99% (if not more) of all the blogs and sites are residing in the long tail. This long tail content is being provided by the independent writers, bloggers and hobbyists writing in their own fields of expertise and niche on their independent sites and blogs. But almost none of them are making any significant money. The problem here is all of them own very small portions of long tail. The volume is so low – that it hardly translates into anything whether it’s traffic, traction or money.

What is the real secret in making money in the long tail?

The truth is you make money on the long tail and not being in the long tail.

Long tail is the game of volume; you need to own a substantial volume of the long tail if you are serious about making money. Though there are challenges in how to effectively and efficiently own big chunks of long tail content volume, but we will come to that later in this article. First let’s take up Amazon long tail model. Most of the sales of Amazon’s inventory come from obscure books and products. These books and product might be selling one or two items in a year but the sum of sales of all these products outrank the sales of Amazon’s bestsellers. This phenomenon is captured nicely in a quote from an Amazon employee: “We sold more books today that didn’t sell at all yesterday than we sold today of all the books that did sell yesterday.”

The trick here is not the long tail itself but the efficiency in which Amazon was able to build that long tail for themselves. Amazon was able to do so with the help of its millions of partners who were looking for a platform to sell their obscure items.

Now let’s apply the long tail principle to the content model. Long tail is divided into two different groups. Commercially viable long tail and non-commercial long tail. Let me explain, somebody uploading pictures of his birthday bash is a great user-generated content, but only to him and his close set of friends. This lies in the non-commercial part of long tail. Don’t expect to make money onto it.

It is not only about adding content, it’s to first understand what users are looking for and then adding content.

Another example – when you do a story on iPad, iPhone, Twitter or any other news; you are not part of the long tail. You are part of the head section in the long tail curve as the shelf life of news is couple of days or hours in few cases. To remain in the long tail –you have to enrich your news in such a way that it remains useful for someone even visiting after few months of publishing.

How to play for the long tail?

1. Create more evergreen content. Enrich your content with more research, comparisons, fact boxes, media, info-graphics; hence increasing its shelf life.

2. Produce content which has an advertiser, reader and virality. The means if you are writing on your spiritual beliefs, your pay checks will always be small – because you don’t have an advertiser in that niche. And if you are writing content by stuffing keywords researched from Google Adwords, you will never have a reader for it. Thirdly if you are only pushing content for the sake of pushing more and more content but don’t have an expertise or interest in that subject you will never be able to promote it across social media or search.

3. Produce content at a large scale in a very efficient manner keeping focus on high quality.

Who is making money in long tail?

Volume required is so high that it is not possible for fragmented bloggers or writers to take advantage of long tail. Now the question arises if not writers and freelancers – they maybe mainstream media houses can do this? After all they have been creating expensive and useful content in volumes for decades now. But the truth is news has a short life; it loses most of its value just after couple of days. Essentially big mainstream organisations are sitting on a huge worthless archive of articles that have become irrelevant, at least until someone finds a new business model for them.

To make money of this long tail, we need new kind of social media organizations who can understand the importance of efficiency in content creation and are equipped with strong technology platforms which do following things in a highly efficient and scalable way.

1. Divide the content creation into assembly line mode of operation. Provide a collaborative environment in which the content creation starts from market research; picking topics from commercial long tail and then bringing writers, copy-editors, researchers, multimedia experts together. Just what AOL Seed, and Demand Studios are doing.

2. Produce as much content as you can. Typical an article will take anything from 3 months to 6 months to recover its cost and will make you profit after that for its life. Average life of an article can vary from 24 to 36 months. But a right piece of content can even last for a decade as well.

3. Keep eye on all metrics at all time; cost of article creation, time to create, traffic, social links and amplification, revenue and most importantly margin. Margins can range on long tail content from anything between 40-80% (avg. 3 years). Any small fluctuation in a single metric can entirely change the complete game.

We have seen a lot of creative business models coming out in recent months pushing for the long tail pie. Though the market is huge and has ample of room for many more players as well. But still the one with best efficiency and ability to fully integrate technical professionals into their content production process will have the bigger laugh if not the last.

Every content network has walked this rope at least once – ad inventory optimization. Direct sales team can only sell 40-50% of your ad inventory at any given time. The rest is filled with different ad networks, big and small. The math is very simple; push those ad networks which pay you higher CPM all the time. However, the truth is, no single ad network pays highest CPM all the time. It varies a lot depending on geography, time, page/site context, readers, etc. And to top it all, with strict frequency capping and default ads deployed, ad networks leave you playing with pennies.

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Indirect sales can result in 30-40% of total ad revenue for any mid-size to large publisher. Today, for any smart publisher it’s must to optimize their indirect sales channel to boost the revenue. This becomes more challenging as almost all ad networks are closed wall and have not (neither have intentions to) come out with APIs giving power to publishers.

Frequency capping

According to Wikipedia, Frequency capping is a term in advertising that means restricting (capping) the amount of times (frequency) a specific visitor to a website is shown a particular advertisement. This restriction applies to all websites that serve ads from the same advertising network.

In a competitive market where marketers are demanding more accountability, it’s obvious that ad networks have to optimize their ad delivery to boost CTR. However, this turns the balance in favor of ad networks. Publishers have little or no insight of how the pricing is structured for low CPM ads, and it converts into revenue loss.

Defaults

Nothing frustrates publishers more than defaults. Just like it’s impossible for you to sell your 100% ad inventory in direct sales, so is for the ad networks as well. Even Google Adsense, which today has the biggest pool of advertisers, can fill your ad inventory up to a certain limit.

Most ad networks allow you to specify tags from different ad networks to serve ads in case they don’t have any for your users. Publishers deploy static chains of ad networks pushing ads from other ad networks in case one defaults. These static chains are cumbersome to deploy or change. Publishers have no or little power to use their real time data to modify the chain whenever they want.

Some ad optimization networks like Pubmatic are offering dynamic daisy chains to publishers where default ad impressions are collected and then routed to the highest paying ad network.

Real time optimization

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“Yesterday’s home runs don’t win today’s games.” Babe Ruth

The goal of optimization is to maximize the yield of ad networks in real time. As pointed out earlier, this becomes daunting as ad networks are not ready to come out with their APIs. Yes, even the self-proclaimed “Don’t be Evil” giant shield its Adsense reports behind its own walls. You need either some grease-monkey script or advance data mining techniques to get into their systems and let you evaluate their performance based on CPM, click-through, conversions, defaults, etc. in real time and serve ads from best performing ad network for that case.

Segmentation

This for once, I will admit, Adsense is much better than any other ad network. They let you segment your ad zones very precisely. Their multiple-channel and url-channel tracking put publisher in driving seats; helping him optimize his inventory to any level. But again, the real challenge is to optimize Adsense with other ad newtorks and push an ad network only if it’s supposed to yield maximum output.

Ad optimization networks like Yield Build and Pubmatic helps you to some extent, but they are also tied with few ad networks only. Moreover, their system is best build for publishers doing 25 million and above pageviews per month leaving out small to mid-size publishers.

Monetizing international traffic is also a gem in the rough. Identify top countries sending you traffic and tie up with local ad networks to serve ads in those regions. No matter how good your current sets of ad networks are, they can never beat the local players.

Website targeting v/s page targeting – It’s no brainer that niche verticals pays you higher CPM (no I am not talking about sites dedicated to celebs). Every ad network identifies the page it’s serving ads on basis of context of the page, website or the user its showing ads for. If you have a large website divided into different channels, it’s worth finding out which ad networks are performing best of which sections or channels. Targeting the ad networks to the niche group will be instrumental in pulling higher eCPM than large, broad and general segment.

Short tail vs long tail

Thanks to Internet, today, life cycle of a content piece is more than few days. A content piece can continue to make money for anything between 12-18 months even after it’s published. Many contextual ad networks performed (both in terms of CPM and CTR) much better than others when they receive traffic from search engines or various links pointing to your site.

Control

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Who has the control between you and networks? Irrespective of what your account manager has told you, the truth is that you are standing on sidelines. Remember, no APIs means no control. If you really want to be in driving seat, you need to crash their ad network walls and get the reports in real time and make them compete with each other for every single ad impression.

Deploying an ad optimization engine is like passing away your control from one demon to another. This needs to be an in-house deployment giving you powers to tweak even the smallest things.

Not defying the credentials of Ad Optimization Networks

By voicing out these points, I am not defying the credentials of the already running ad-optimization platforms, if they work well for you nothing like that, I have heard great stories from people who use them but as the saying goes, one size never fits for all.

Disclaimer: At Instablogs, we are also working on our ad-optimization engine to help maximize our revenue.

In my recent visit to Vienna, met a lot of interesting people from Norway. My initial impression of Norway’s online market was that of a small and passive market with few clones of popular global sites like Facebook, Digg, Craigslist catering to the local audience. But after interacting with my Norwegian friends, I realized not only Norway has a mature online marketplace but have aggressive online players pushing for audience share. Norway also has one of the highest ad spend per user of around US$207.

Comparison with US

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The market size both in terms of online users and advertisement of Norway is extremely small in comparison, and one might dismiss it at a single glance. But on analyzing it closely, one can see few brownies embedded here and there.

Strong online presence by newspapers

While in most other countries newspapers take away very little share of total online time spent, Norwegian story is entirely different. Top newspapers sites of Norway like Vg.no, Dagbladet.no , Nettavisen.no, e24.no, Aftenposten.no etc constitutes a huge portion of total online spent by Norwegian users. Norwegian newspapers have been extremely aggressive from pre-Google era in building their online presence. Dagbladet.no and Startsiden have been publishing news online from early 1995 and 1996 respectively.

Norway also has the highest newspaper readership in the world and most of its top online media properties are owned by big media players like Schibsted, Eddy Media etc giving them ample space to push content to their existing offline readers.

Top online sites in Norway

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VG Nett

Online site charges around $30,000 for a day long banner on its homepage - which is more than a full-page color ad in its printed paper.

E24

Launched in mid 2006, the site started making serious money within few weeks. Today it makes more than $5million from only banner sales.

Finn.no

Popular Norwegian classified portal generates as much as 30-35% of revenue that its parent company Schibsted does from its offline channel, but profit margin is around 65% high.

Design

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One unique aspect of most of the sites in Norway is their use of big pictures, bold headlines and long pages. In average it will take 7-10 scroll to reach bottom of the page. Mobile sites are also very functional, maybe because Norway is the birth place of Nokia.

Counterparts of popular global sites in Norwegian

1. Facebook, Myspace

Nettby, founded in late 2006 is the second largest Internet-based community in Norway (after Facebook) with more than 1 million users and profiles.

2. Digg

MSN Reporter was launched only in three markets, the Netherlands, Belgium and Norway. MSN Reporter more or less works like Digg where news gets promoted to the frontpage via ‘Diggs’. On MSN Reporter you have to “Kick” or “Dump” an article. But, unlike Digg, you do not need to be registered with MSN Reporter to start voting.

3. Yahoo

There are numerous portal trying the Yahoo act, but the most closest is Startsiden.

4. News aggregator

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5. Craigslist

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6. Weather Channel

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7. Blogger/Wordpress

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Ad Networks

Since most of the large media sites are owned by big media houses, these sites employ their direct market sales team. But few ad networks have been successful for catering to small to medium sites or filling up unsold inventories for big groups. Adpower.no owned by Edda Media, powers over 50 publishers and is a leader in the contextual space (after Google) in Norway. Another company NetAd SA was acquired by Germany’s 1&1 Ad Network.

All in all Norway has a small but mature online ad market. For a foreign publisher to establish itself will mean taking away share from already present media sites. Most of the big sites targets a general audience and there is definitely room for niche verticals.

Most of the start-ups as well as established companies in internet space primarily targets US audience. This is understandable as US Online Advertising market stands at a whopping USD 24 billion and is at least four times bigger than the second largest market that of UK.

Global Ad Industy

In developing countries, it’s a rarity if an internet company gets funded, and most of the start-up visionaries here are not very bullish when it comes to internet space. Countries like China, Brazil or India might lead in number of internet users with around 33% of total online traffic, but their online advertising market is less than USD 2 billion. Though China has some exceptional online players but nothing close to US.

Europe has a mature market in terms of internet penetration with Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, and Denmark having more than 85% penetration. Online advertising spend has already taken over TV ad spend in UK and Denmark. Owning to the mature market (higher online penetration) ad spend per person in Europe is quiet healthy. Marketers in Europe are not shy to experiment with online properties. Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and other large players have already explored Europe and have decent revenue coming out of Europe. Many young internet start-ups emerging from Europe have made big globally. European start-ups are at advantage of having a decent domestic online market letting them establish themselves here first and then becoming more aggressive when taking on a global audience (primarily US). Skype, Bebo, Netvibes, Joost are some of the start-ups having roots in Europe.

So let’s analyse two key components; ad spend per person and internet penetration rate. India’s online spend per person stands at shameful USD 5 and that of Norway is USD 207. That means an online content portal operating in India can bring in 40 times more revenue if it’s to be run in Norway. Of course there are many other factors involved like cost of operation is comparatively less in India, no of online users are small in Norway etc but my point is making money in Norway for an internet start-up is easier than in India.

The other factor is internet penetration rate. Internet penetration rate is defined as the percentage of Internet users divided by populations for each country. An Internet user is defined as being over 16 years old and uses the Internet on a regular or occasional basis in businesses and homes. Higher the penetration, mature is the market. Marketers are at ease as they can target a larger audience.

Online Media companies which started in US or have targeted US can easily expand globally by exploring some of these markets with higher internet penetration and ad spend per person. Many successful content sites like Engadget, Techcrunch, Asylum are already having their presence in local versions. Most of these sites started targeting the US ad pie, but riding their brand presence have emerged as strong players in various local markets.

10. She is smart.

She will always have some interesting news, which you have missed. Your conversations can be long and interesting, and you can talk about WoW, Jedis, Diggers,web two-oh, and the new Star Trek Movie.

9. Can be easily motivated to turn their hobbies into full blown cash machine.

For example, if she likes shopping (name a girl who doesn’t) she can be be easily convinced and motivate to build a blog/site/portal around it. And you be assured that she will leave no stone unturned to convert it into a financial hub.

8. You can distract her easily in fights

Whenever you get into a fight, you can start talking about latest trends, technology and all other geeky stuff. She will in no time, will either start searching for it on her iPhone or on the next closest workstation in her vicinity; completely forgetting the reason why the fight started.

7. Great sense of humor

Geeks are witty and have a great sense of humor. She can make techie jokes around everything. Being around a geek is always fun.

6. Geeks are excellent parents.

Firstly because your geeky wife will pass her “smart genes” to your kid. Secondly she is always innovative in raising her. So don’t be surpised to see your 18 months old kid handling iPhone or your laptop perfectly.

5. New ways to communicate.

You will always have a new way to communicate with her; Gtalk, Twitter, Facebook, SMS, Email. So there will never be an communication issue.

4. Engaging

Geeks can be engaged in meanigful discussion like why Star Trek themed Home Theater is better than Terminator themed home theater. They will always have enough information to discuss on most of the stuff relevant to you.

3. Movies.

You can watch Transformers, Ocean Series, Simpsons with her anyday. You can even watch Star Trek and Star Wars multiple times without being called out childish.

2. She knows technology.

She will spends hours with you unlocking and jailbreaking the new iPhone version and enjoy every moment of it.

1. She is respected in the community

She will be interviewed and acknowledged by her peers and will occasionally win few awards for her work and knowledge. You will share some of her accolades as being identified as their better half.

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These days we are training a new team. A team of freshers, from different educational backgrounds; commerce, science, MBA, mass-com etc. This team will be helping the content network move more aggressively. You might be surprised by our choice of team members, you might even argue on our decision of putting them in a single team. But we only hire on the basis of aptitude, not on experience or educational background. All of them might have different educational backgrounds; but they have lots of common things like hunger to learn, work under any pressure, no compromise for quality and a killer attitude.

All-Girls Marine

This new team is also an all-girls team. (We inducted few guys, but had to let them go in a week after failing to cope with the pressure). These girls from the day one, have been given tough assignments and a limited time to complete them. Yesterday, many of them felt that the tasks are very tough owing to the limited time. They required more time as they didn’t wanted to compromise on the quality.

Tough assignment is a sign of respect

My argument to the All-Girls Marine team was that the tough assignment is a sign of respect. I would never ask our office cook to do this assignment. Not because I don’t respect our cook, I respect him deeply for his contributions, but I don’t trust him doing content assignments. The toughness of the task is proportional to the respect you command. I don’t expect everyone to pass the training, and few might leave in between, which is actually fine, and I totally respect that. My father used to say, not every peak is a Mt.Everest. Every hill, mountain range has its own peak.

Flashback

One of the reasons, Instablogs has reached to this level (we still have miles to go), is that we had limited funds when we started. $1000 in cash and another $2000 in credit cards. Failure was not an option. We had extreme pressure to become profitable in next 3 months or go out of the business. I was a first time entrepreneur and had no knowledge of VC industry at that time. So to grow the business, the only option was to become profitable and nothing else.

Fortunately, we had limited funds.

This line of thinking may go against popular thoughts, but I feel that if we had good funds, lets say $50,000 or $100,000 at the time of start, we had a higher chance of going out of the business in few months. It was that pressure of limited resources, which forced us to think out of the box. I still remember the pilot team working at a stretch for 48 hours to launch the site on time. We were sleeping for 3-5 hours those days. One of the readers even suggested a new name for us– ROBN - Reverse Order Blog Network. We were anything but normal.

Fortunately, we had limited funds. Fortunately, we had limited time. Fortunately it was tough to do. If it was easy, everybody would have been doing it. Today I believe that limited funds at that time was a sign of respect by god to us, and one of the primary reason for whatever success we have today.

So next time you face a challenge, consider it as a sign of respect by god. A diamond is a chunk of coal that is made good under pressure. Its only those who are fortunate enough are bestowed with pressure of tough times.

P.S.: New team is working with full throttle again. Why? Because, fortunately, this is tough to do. :)

Mr. Negi

We had a teacher Mr. Negi. I don`t know his full name, never asked, and never felt to do so.

pain is good

Mr. Negi was a guy in mid forties with short height, thin moustaches and cold eyes. His rules were very simple – you can’t complain, and you can’t say no. He never told us about his rules, but we understood them in few interactions with him. If you asked him for rest, he will say – “Bahut acha kiya jo bata diya, ab yeh exercise aadhe ghante aur karo, jab tak fresh na ho jao”. (“Very good, I really appreciate your telling me, now please do this exercise for another half an hour, until you start feeling fresh.”) And if you told him about back pain, he will award you a dozen of back exercise. Similarly if you ask about lunch or dinner time, you are surely to skip that.

Once I was carrying a heavy rucksack, during one of the trekking trails. I was sweating profoundly, when he asked me if bag was heavy. Before realizing any consequence I told him, yes it was. He smiled very calmly and repeated the famous phrase. “Bahut acha kiya jo bata diya, ab yeh pathar utha lo, aur bag me daal do, halka ho jaayega”. (Very good, I really appreciate your telling me, now please pick these stones and rocks and put in your bag, your luggage will feel light.)

I tried very hard explaining that I spoke unintentionally and I never meant to complain. But it was too late; Mr. Negi has always treated all of us equal when awarding his famous remedies.

From that day, subconsciously I developed a feeling – that I can’t complain. Whatever happens, I can’t complain.

Forward a few years. Now I am running a startup.

Startups are also like Mr. Negi, they don’t accept complaints. You can’t negotiate. They don’t tell you the rules. You have to understand them. Whatever they give you, you have to take that. You can’t talk to them back. You just smile and appreciate whatever comes your way.

Pain is good.

Somebody once told me – running a startup is like testing your ability to bear the pain. But pain is good, as Mr. Negi would have put that. Pain tells you that your muscles are strengthening, and if you want to be a skilled mountaineer, this is what it takes. So when you feel that pain running your startup , smile. Because your startup is telling you that your venture is strengthening, and to be good entrepreneur, this is what it takes.

Mr. Negi, used to remind us that mountaineering is not something which you can buy in a market like your Nike shoes. You have to earn that. Running a startup is also a skill which no MBA school can teach you (yes, I am aware of all those new entrepreneurial courses), but you have to go through that cycle of pain, to earn it. I am still learning that art, but have started enjoying the pain.

Remember, pain is good. Pain tells you, that you are growing.