[Editorial Notes: Guest article by Subbu Murugan of Ventunotech. Subbu shares his perspective on the state of online video industry in India.]
It’s apparent from the picture below that one of the main issues with the state of online video in India is that Indians don’t consume as much content as their counterparts in the US. The reason usually attributed to this is that the internet penetration is very low. India has 100 million internet connections and is the 3rd largest internet population in the world next to China and US! However, out of this 100 million, 40 million come from mobile and within the 60 million online, actives are only 30 million. The main reasons for lower consumption of videos are also because
- Availability of quality video content
- Few sites in India provide video content
The reasons for lack of quality content online, both short and long form, is due to fact that there are limited monetization avenues and distribution/syndication mechanisms for video content are very limited today in India.
Although there are many video ad networks, their ability to give good inventory fills and yields are suspect. The main reasons for the same are
- They are trying to get ad budgets allocated from digital spends as opposed to TV spends
- Because of the above mentioned reason they end up selling video ad inventory like a display ad inventory
- They are limited to getting ads to one geography today i.e., if it’s an Indian ad network you would get ads only for India.
This monetization limitation makes content development, specific to this medium, very challenging for publishers and independent content creators. Also for the traditional content owner have not found the right set of service providers who would make their content ready for mobile and internet consumption and distribute them across the web and mobile access points. There are content networks like TAN, Rajshri, & Star TV out there in the market; however, they are limited in providing content only from their library which makes their reach very limited.
The solution for this problem is mainly a content network that can aggregate content across categories from multiple quality content owners from the traditional world and push it to publishers with content/audience matching and monetization. This clearly creates not only large scale audience across categories but also creates reach and targeting for advertisers like they are used to in the TV world.
What’s your take?
