Upscale Movie Magazine - Continued
Ragu had posted a few comments and you can read them here
Decided to work the numbers for this idea also and figure out if and Upscale movie magazine idea makes sense
Target Audience
1) Film fraternity - Anyone who has to do anything remotely connected to the Business of movie making
2) Film buffs - People like me who would love to figure out Mani ratnam visualized a scene and how Ram gopal varma does research for gangster flicks ( his better one’s of course ).
3) Any amateur videgraphers - right from the guy who does the visual fx for your marriage DVD to your cousing who posts his holiday videos on youtube or better still on Y! Video
4) Any person who is interested in performing arts ( say theatre, television )
It might be easy to research numbers for 1, but how do we measure the potential customer from those who would fall under 2,3 and 4 ?
Boils down again to the "Bias for analysis / Bias for action" discussion from the previous post. Can we build the most thorough mathematical model and state for sure that we are looking at a market of 10 lakhs.
Revenue streams
1) Subscription revenue from the magazine
2) Content syndication revenue - assuming that you generate fairly compelling content, it should be possible to build content syndication partnerships with general magazines like India Today, Outlook and so on and with online partners like Y! India and Rediff.
3) Advertisement revenue from our own online presence - Given the decreasing costs of having an online presence, could we monetize the hits on our web page by shown advetisements ( say for Subhash Ghai’s actor training school or for the local animation tranining school in bangalore).
Arguments for the Idea
1) If we use the american magazine market as a surrogate for how Indian market will shape up in a few years, then things look promising since the first place is by a TV guide ( assuming that in theme this magazine is close enough to our end product ).
Argument against the Idea
1) It is a paradox , but the contents of the proposed magazine would actually try to distinguish itself from magazines that dished out content high on gossip value. So in this case, the fact that you dont have a "Movie" magazine in the top 20 is disappoiting.
To do a flip flop again, what worked well for America may not necessarily make sense for India, so may be there is still hope for an upscale Movie magazine.
I could go on and on jumping both sides of the fence .. but my gut feel tells me that this idea in the right hands could be a potential success. It definitely wont be a 1000 crore idea but with good execution it could easily become a 25 crore idea in 2-3 years.
Thanks for replying to comments and adding your view points. I really appreciate taking your time out and such healthy discussion is really useful.
Content syndication is definitely a good idea. More targetted syndication to overseas companies like Yahoo and Google and other media giants which eventually would start localising content for each country and region. Yahoo movies for e.g. would be more and more localised in future. These companies have to keep growing in Wall Street and they cannot ignore other countries for a long time.
I completely agree with you when you say no idea is good or bad, what matters is the people executing it. When an idea as simple as ‘video sharing website’ can be sold for 1.x billion dollars, its only the execution and criticising our own ideas that matter.
On a different note, how long do you think that it would take for printed magazines in India to be challenged heavily by the advocation of many online magazines? It is already happening in US with printed magazines and newspapers making heavy losses…read: Tribune, LA times etc. It might even be an option to have this magazine idea as an online magazine….agreed, there arent many people in India who would read magazines online. But its going to change. And keeping it online lowers the cost terribly, think about the margin we can make with no printing and supply chain costs!! And serving to an NRI market through online would also be helpful. What I have seen is that once indians come to US and see the more quality magazines here about movies and art, they would be more willing to subscribe to a quality magazine on Indian movies and art. With increasing interest in Indian affairs with US universities, art schools in US universities can be a market as well. For all these, online is the way to go (probably in addition to a printed magazine). Tamil magazines like ‘Vikatan’ have made decent money serving just a small proportion of Tamil NRIs through online.
Inviting user reviews of movies, in addition to the expert reviews (withough diluting quality) would attract more audience and all these are very easy to do online. With increasing bandwidth, video interviews can be added (they are already available in sites like indiaglitz.com). All in all, I agree,the idea is definitely worth attempting.
Comment by Ragu — November 10, 2006 @ 5:31 pm