Gyaan Sutra

Nautanki TV and iYogi featured in a Business Week article this week (I’m not sure it was business week, do tell me if you know which magazine it was). The article was about startups to watch out for. So I decided to check both of them out. I had covered iYogi in a recent article so I decided to do one about Nautanki.

So a google search took me to a Digital Inspiration post about the same, where there was a registration link and other information about the site. (link for registration given below). I tried registering and got a mail to confirm my email address. So far so good. But when I clicked the link it gave me this error message

Table ‘osmosnet_ntv.formemails’ doesn’t exist

Strange.
Moreover, there are a few comments on Amit’s post by Amit himself about the Nautanki videos not being available. Another commenter Aseem is wondering if they are already out of server capacities.

Another interesting thing that I came to know was when this guy called Sunil R Nair, who I think is one of the Nautaki’s founder (somebody people tell me who is the guy with the handlebar?)was responding to the comments regarding a question about the payouts, he says (My comments in Yellow)

We charge our advertisers Rs 5 per view from may onwards which means there is no way that a publisher would make Rs 5 per view. Am not sure from where that idea came about.(Oh sorry, we thought we would be paid well. Alas you will keep all the money. Anyways now I know why doesn’t Google disclose things like this.)

You will make 15% of the ad revenue - if we get better priced ads ( am sure we will get better prices as we go along) - which means if we improve the rate per view you will get more value per view.

You get paid per view and you will have to figure out where and what categories of videos get you better views.

As with all networks payouts(I have the feeling of talking to a government employee) happen after an audit for click frauds etc and the cheques are posted within 45 days of the total value reaching Rs 10000. Please do write to us at info@nautanki.tv if you have further doubts

That converted to USD (so that it can be compared to Adsense and please don’t spam me about this.), that means that you get paid $0.0174 per view (15% of Rs 5) and you get paid after 45 days, if you have accumulated $233.558 (Rs 10,000). (For those of you who are not aware, google pays about $0.04 per click on average websites, pays after 30 days, when you have collected $100). Considering Adsense pays per click, and Nautanki pays per view, it might be a decent alternative to Adsense, especially for blogs in Indian languages.

The website is still very much in beta (they haven’t put up a website too) so I don’t want to be too harsh, but it’s sad to see a company getting so much publicity and yet failing on such simple operations and getting bad PR for free. I am sure they have a great business model, which might make them millions, but I also have the feeling that maybe they should have stayed in stealth for some more time.

Getting bad PR even before you start is definitely not the most ominous sign. Even the best of business models would not be able to survive it.

However the company has started a corporate blog (link below), which has been alive for close to six months now. And I just couldn’t believe they have put it up on blogspot. Whatever happened to professionalism.

Strangely even Naukri.com’s CEO has a blog, which is again on blogger. What I don’t understand is that how much does it take to set up a new blog with a domain name? About $100? Or you can set it up on the company domain itself. It hurts when you know that these companies are supposed to be at the spearhead of the Indian Online Revolution. No wonder that most of the time the UI’s are pathetic.

Take these two cases, Naukri’s CEO, and Nautanki’s blog both use the default template available from blogger. I do think that if you do start a corporate blog, it is worth spending a little time on it. Consider this, Rishiraj.info is a beautifully designed blog and Rishi Raj is a class 8 student. They could just hire him to create a blog for them.

Maybe it’s time for some soul searching about where the Indian Online Industry is really growing, because to me, things are not all that clear.

Digital Inspiration Post on Nautanki | NautankiTV | Registration Form for Bloggers | Nautanki Blog | Rishi Raj’s Blog | Naukri’s CEO Blog

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UPDATE: 15 minutes later I get a response from Nautanki stating that

Congratulations! You are now an approved publisher of Nautanki.TV. You can start publishing our channels and videos now and start earning!!!

To login into the publisher panel, click here:
http://www.osmos.net/nautanki/publishers/index.php

Any guesses about what happens when I click the link?? Yes, right on

Table ‘osmosnet_ntv.formemails’ doesn’t exist

UPDATE: Ram of NautankiTV replies in an email

We did experience a hacking attack on our servers the day before yesterday for around 4 hours.

Though we were sure that there was no intrusion per se we took the cautionairy approach and hot loaded the backup for all the scripts.

We first concentrated on getting the front end up and then started on the back end. Unfortunately 32 publishers used this window to register with us and the links they got went out with the older server address.

if you replace http://www.osmos.net/nautanki/ with http://www.nautanki.tv/ in the email sent to you and cutpaste the url on to the browser your sign in process will be completed.