Happy to announce our investment in chakpak.com – the largest online community for Indian entertainment. 
We are excited to partner with Accel in financing the company, largely because:
- Entertainment is a high usage and engagement category – As per Comscore, 18 million visitors in India already access entertainment content. Add to that the NRI base, and that number should be in 25-30M range.
- Entertainment is also a high spend category, with over $36B spends on media and entertainment as per PwC FICCI Frames report. Some sections of this are addressable by chakpak over time – for example, movie marketing alone is a $500M market.
- Efficient execution – over 5 million users access chakpak services every month, and chakpak team has done a great job of generating such levels of usage without spending a dime on marketing. They “get” the internet.
And to top it all, we are already getting our share of brickbats on making the investment, which means we might have just done something right 🙂
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Take it as my prediction that the site is soon going to fall from the cliff cause they have played black hat SEO with the search engines while going up. And with the latest changes on different search engines soon that is going to come back and haunt them.
All the best!
1. Deep data play – promote UGC so that it eventually builds irreplicable content that will take competition long long time to replicate. Promote UGC as a credo – annotating tools, self-service, community created data categories and applications, open APIs — all the works. From what I see now on Chakpak, lot is possible.
2. Deeper data play – community will annotate passionately if you provide actual film media (songs, sequences). Hell, that’s under copyright. Crack that limitation and you open a floodgate of possibilities. Terrific metadata makes e-retailing digital content far stronger than discounts, tie-ups and offers. Specially in the long run, the e-retailer becomes a default destination and potentially creates lock-ins.
3. Exploit the long tail of Indian films (almost 2 Lacs of certified Indian feature films) through interconnectedness of content. “Popular”, “Hits”, “Latest” are creations of a media age limited by shelf space – the web platform has no such limitation. Majority community will come for the ‘head’ but redirect them to discover the long tail through smart algorithm play.
4. As a responsible UGC site, allow participative copyright control by allowing contributors to choose from Creative Commons attributes for their reviews rather than “All rights reserved.” for everything.
5. Copyright becomes an issue only when it is invoked and that will happen when you become popular and visible, or when the contesting big banner thinks it can get enough money out of you. Every bit of an Indian film is under copyright, even something like film posters. You have a lot of copyright stuff on the site. One can indemnify oneself by letting users add media at their own risk but thats not the most comfortable of all arrangements.
All the best. 🙂
Good news for Chakpak, how is its current revenue?
One of my friend had chakpak installed on his orkut profile. Chakpak used to send us updates that he played this quiz and that quiz almost every other day – whereas he never used chakpak after he installed it. We had actually started calling this guy chakpak only, and he finally got so bugged by these forged updates that he recently uninstalled chakpak from his profile.
I hope this was one off incident and not a mass practice to increase user hits.
Regards,
Manish
Thanks Alok.
after 7 months on the web, viewership of the mobile bioscope video above jumped 5x in 48 hours. details in user comments
Chou