Founder & CEO of Merinews.com, Vipul Kant Upadhyay is a serial entrepreneur, with over 15 years of cross border experience in starting, managing and turning around small to midsized technology and service driven organizations. Vipul has been a speaker at various international and national forums on the subjects of Citizen Journalism and ICT.

You launched Merinews.com at a time the concept of online media was not so popular in India? What was the idea and inspiration behind launching Merinews?

The question itself answers the question.  Being the largest democracy of the world, India and its citizens have the inherent DNA of being highly expressive and reactive to subjects of international, national, social, personal, local interests. I always felt that such a democratic media platform is very apt in the Indian context – socially as well as commercially.  The common man hardly had avenues of speaking out their mind on a media platform with credibility. Traditional media routes were always handicapped by time, space and biases. This GAP gave birth to Merinews.com.

We started through the online route because we wanted to stay true to the mission of creating a democratic platform. Internet, unlike the print or electronic media, does not have limitations with respect to interactivity, depth and had higher possibilities of being made truly democratic. I was convinced about the growth of internet in India despite the infrastructure challenges. It did grow slower than we expected, but then today it has enough consumers to create a substantial business.

What were the initial challenges? How did you overcome them?

There were many – consumer behaviour, marketing and investor mindset.

The concept itself required a change in consumer behaviour. We started in an era when people were used to swords more than the pen. Raising voices on a virtual platform didn’t seem to be the first preference. We had to work hard through contact programs to educate the citizens. People raised questions and statements - who would write unless you pay, I would write if you pay and it ended up with people saying OK I will write but we stood firm non payment for writing and it worked, the same set of people who raised doubts became the regular CJs on Merinews.

We picked up a lot of features highlighting lesser discussed, yet important topics and communities namely Indian Rock Band Industry, Save Tiger campaigns, Reservation etc.

We did find some initial attraction among the blogger community but then our policy of moderating and filtering content before publishing did face initial stumble blocks. But we were convinced about the processes. The idea was not only to create a people powered alternate news platform, but to be a responsible and credible media platform.

Our first boost came with the Manthan Award in 2006 followed by the ‘official honoree’ status in the Webby Awards 2007. We suddenly found ourselves in midst of international media houses referring and sourcing news stories/ideas from us. That helped spreading the word and the contributors grew.

We haven’t invested any amount in marketing activities so far, rather banked on contact programs and word of mouth to gather the community of around 50,000 citizen journalists that we have today ( Don't mistake them with registrations, registrations are many folds). Such organic growth takes time and is slow – but the model required such kind of approach. Now that the market is mature, we will look to extensive scaling up.

Another problem we faced was the business mindset. When we started, we were the only one in India and while people looked at the business model with skepticism about its revenue potential, we were quite convinced and hence we stay committed and stayed put. It took time but paid off. Today we have dozens of Merinews clones in the market where we stand as the leader of the space with demonstrated models for revenue as well as business.

What is your funding status? Are you looking for funds? If yes, how would you utilize the fund?

We are in a phase where we have created a proof of concept for the model, its sustainability and scalability. We have tried and tested most of our revenue streams and established the fact that citizen journalism can be a viable business model in India. We now are poised to take the big leap and scale up the business and for that we are looking at our first round of external funding and strategic partnerships.

There are three arenas we are focusing on – increasing the community base, local level penetration and technological advancement and all this obviously will lead to enhanced revenue. While we do this, we will keep the focus on quality of content and community.

What is the prime revenue model of Merinews?

There had been a lot of talks about how citizen journalism based media portals cannot build sustainable revenue streams.  In the initial days, we were banking mostly on advertisements through ad-networks. However, at that point building up a credible community was our prime aim. As I said earlier, we were waiting for the market to mature up. But now that we have tried, tested and proved most of our planned revenue streams which range from advertising, local listings, ecommerce and content syndication. We now are working towards optimizing these revenue streams and re-launching a few of them.

What was the thought behind launching the Gurgaon print tabloid edition?

Gurgaon print edition is a part of our ‘Go Local Be Global’ plan. With the internet penetration increasing, the people sensitized to the power of the medium, we feel the time is ripe for gathering ‘local discussions’ on our platform. We anyway have a lot of local content on our platform which we started segregating and aggregating recently by launching the Gurgaon online edition. The print tabloid is positioned as a ‘citizen powered newspaper’ and is meant to support the online edition by reaching up to the audience at large (people who aren’t possibly regular on the internet) apart from the fact that it adds on to our revenue stream for sure.

How has been the revenue growth of Merinews so far? What are your revenue expectations this fiscal?

Since we were mainly focusing on building the community base and focusing on the spread of the word in organic route, initial revenues flowed in slowly. We have touched peak revenue of approx US$ 31,000 per month and for a few months sustained at average revenue of around US$ 15,000 per month. At current level we are once again concentrating on growth and scaling up while managing to do an operational break even.

What are your priorities as the CEO and Editor-in-chief? Any new ventures planned?

There is a huge untapped niche potential around the Merinews to grow vertically and horizontally. As of now I can only think of growing Merinews and I am committed and focused about Merinews.

There is lot more to be done in and around Merinews to take this business to its optimum levels.

We have conceptualised a couple of businesses around the community that we have built. One such is Merishop.com – which will open up shortly as an ecommerce cum point redemption shop for Merinews’ citizen journalist community.

How do you see online publishing evolving in India?

Online publishing is at a very nascent stage in India. But with the increase of tablets and mobile devices, consumers are looking for more ‘content on the go’.  So I feel a lot of customised content will come up. In fact we are conceptualising our Merinews mobile application in a way where it will store the applied preferences of a reader and connect him with citizen journalists of his likings.

It is believed that in India monetization of content is more of a reality in offline. What is your opinion on this?

If you look at only content monetization, then that may be the case in India as of now. The first reason is that the penetration and consumption of content in the offline medium is much widespread. Smartphone, tablets, e-book readers are new phenomenon in India and internet availability is still limited to a minor population. Big ticket advertisers hence bet on offline medium that ensures more eyeballs. But the future projections of factors driving the online and offline content businesses indicate that the equation is set to change.

The second challenge is obviously a bigger one – branded content. Content is too easily created in online domain and consumption is hugely search oriented. In such a scenario advertisers only could bet on contextual advertising which was resulting into misleading and embarrassing positioning of their brands at times. But the scenario is changing. Search engines are tweaking their logic and discouraging content farms. A gradual ecosystem is evolving where content on internet stands to be an attractive field for advertisers.

Has social media and user generated content changed the dynamics of the online publishing industry?

To some extent, it has.  It has resulted in volume of opinion getting created. It has made the ecosystem much more participatory. But it has also resulted in a lot of chaos and unstructured data. Many of the sites fell back on conceptualising how to structure out the content and present it in terms of valuable information.

What role does regional content have in regards of growing the online publishing Industry? What are your plans on this?

We believe the best thing advent of online did was to bridge the gap of regionalism. Regional content now can find a global platform to be followed and discussed by a much larger audience. We tried with regional content in our initial days, but the market seemed very immature with analytics and user base not in our favour. Today when internet has become a small town phenomenon a lot of geographical distance can be bridged by letting users become publishers. We have launched the Gurgaon Edition to gather regional content, discussion and audience within the city. We wished to go even more micro in Gurgaon – so we are working with various communities within the city namely colleges, RWAs etc and creating white label news and opinion publishing platform for them. Now we will be replicating the same model in other cities across India – processes for the same have already been initiated. Even more interesting is the enthusiasm of various regional communities in having a city based platform. We have already received a number of interests from our established network of citizen journalists who would like to have a city based edition and would like to volunteer motivating local people in sharing news.

Do you see online inventory pricing growing over the coming year?

Till now, in most cases online inventories were sold mostly on performance measurement and not on the credibility or brand value of the publisher. Now that more and more offline players open up their online channels, big ticket advertisers are developing interest towards the medium.

Also analytics need to support the publishing business. Today, we have city based edition and plan to charge the advertisers a premium on the city pages but that is as far as we can go at the moment. The advertising ecosystem and the analytics do not allow us to charge a premium for a particular locality or colony within the city even if there is a critical mass of desired audience. Those things need to evolve out gradually to improve inventory pricing at a hyper local scenario.

How have Indian publishers used the mobile technologies to offer mobile services to their users? What are your plans around this?

Till now, Indian publishers have used the mobile technologies in a very limited way. Its only recently we have found mobile apps coming from the country’s largest media houses. But the good part is the mindset is changing gradually, with the critical mass of readers increasing publishers are also focusing on segmented offering of content through apps and mobile sites. However one thing that publishers need to remember is that mobile can be a very strong publishing tool. Internet coupled with SMS, MMS can be used to create content on the go. That is exactly where we aspire to catch the audience. Citizen Journalism is all about common man generating content. Our mobile site is targeted towards consumption and generation of content on the go. We have mobile apps planned in the similar lines where interactivity with the reader will be on priority.

How do you see the revenues of Indian online publishers growing in the coming years?

Content is still a free commodity in the online space and I don’t see an immediate change in the scenario. So publishers will have to bank on advertisement. But online ad revenue is surely going to see a rise and publishers can charge premium based on their strengths.