India's internet population grew a solid 40% to 277 million in 2015 alone. As the smartphone revolution sweeps the country, every other folk you’ll meet is packing heat. I meant smartphone over-heating. This barrage of first-generation smartphone users would find it more convenient to consume news on the go, and would want them free. This sea change calls for a new crop of journalists. People who can combine speed with the immersive media options online mediums offer. That’s a lucrative opportunity companies are cashing big on.
While academics and industry veterans have stamped the post-2010 period as one of ‘hyper-verticalization’, believe it or not, India’s news industry has seen a host of curation-based startups emerging in the last 48 months. Alibaba Group’s UC News app recently joined the fray.
There is an increasing blur between what's ‘news’, what’s PR and what's just content. This is partly because news is subjective. They both appear as letters on an electronic screen, and can read suspiciously alike. Some say Twitter outrages and internet trolls qualify, others argue this heady mix of content trivializes 'real news', basically things they teach you in journalism schools.
Fun fact:
What’s your idea of news?
News is information. It’s important, and happens every day. Our vision is to integrate all types of content into our product and news is the first step.
There are more than 5,000 newspapers and 2 lakhs online media in India. It’s difficult for users to access the entire range of content being printed, and it’s also difficult for individual players to get huge user-bases individually. We’ll integrate the content from the writer with the consumer using our platform.
Most news organizations have original news content.
Our position is clear. We’ll be aggregators, not producers of the content we publish. We’ll be the platform for media outlets or individual to offer content to the Indian audience.
UC Web will bring big data and machine learning into the news space. The product will learn what the user wants and personalize content offerings based on their preferences. This is the new way to consume content.
So you don’t look forward to having an editorial team onboard?
We don’t have a team currently. We’ll leverage the expertise of our content providers. We might have editors later, but only for hot topics or live topics maybe. Most of the content arrangement will be via machine learning.
We’ll use technology to enhance the user experience, making news consumption faster and smarter. We’re not subscribing to any wire services. That’s not the business model.
So what’s the business model?
We have two working business models – we’ll work with content providers to grow their user-base, and secondly, help content providers manage their tech back-end. In the future, there can also be revenues from advertisements.
We’re not focused on monetization currently. We want to get more users that’ll help our service to reach the maximum number of users. In terms of investment, it’s difficult to be positive right at the beginning. The internet business is a scalable one, so we’ll scale and then monetize.
If you had to choose between being tagged as a ‘news curator’ and ‘content curator’, which one will you go with?
I’ll go with being called a content curator. News is just one information fit. We often don’t know what the content is, so we started off with news.
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