Times Internet: India’s most well kept disaster story.
Have you ever wondered looking at something and wondered how did this actually happen? What were they thinking, what were they doing? No way they could have ended up like this! Times Internet is one such story, every time I look at it all I think is how did they end up like this. How incompetent do you have to be, to be able to use up so much money and such a high brand recognition and end up like this.
Times news publications were a pioneer in digital content that failed to transition to the app world.
Times Group were the digital publishing pioneers in India that created economictimes.com in 1996, timesofindia.com in 1997 and Femina and Filmfare and also property times around the same time. In 1999 Times Group consolidated their digital content under a new company Times Internet which would hold all the digital fantasies of Times Group. In 1999 when this was done Times Group was probably the only news group doing this and no other newspaper owners were doing anything similar. For some time timesofindia.com, economictimes.com and indiatimes.com were separate properties under their own URL. In late 2001 the URLs were merged under indiatimes.com such as timesofindia.indiatimes.com to consolidate traffic count under one brand to tom tom an inflated number to potential advertisers.
Because of the popularity of physical newspapers Times of India and Economic Times, the traffic on indiatimes sites was always high but in perpetual decline, also the traffic has stagnated for long periods even though the number of devices and number of users in India have grown exponentially. Indiatimes current traffic is now estimated to be 150 odd million users per month, wherein almost 75% of the traffic is sourced from external sources such as search and social media and only 25% of the traffic sourced directly, showing a perpetual diminishing of the brand power of Times of India and Economic Times over time.
To add to the misery of Times Internet, it completely missed the App memo, Times Internet was not able and is still not able to compete with the upstarts of news apps of India, Newshunt/Dailyhunt, started in 2007 now has more than 100 Million installed users across platforms while Times of India languishes at 10 Million and Economic Times at 1 Million.
This stagnation / decline of Times Group in internet news could be because Times Internet has traditionally been doing internet the same way most corporates do IT in India, they hire a CEO who is trained/expert at taking orders from the owner without questions, and who in turn hires a CTO who takes advice from the technology companies on how to do technology. If the owner does not understand how people behave on the internet it is unlikely the CEO and CTO can deliver a user experience that users want in 2020.
This approach has led to Times Internet having a clunky user experience disconnected from the new digital world, because techies were building the site on the orders of the owners, who were busy being inspired by foreign sites. Even today if you by mistake enter a times internet site, your first instinct is to run away as fast as possible, as it feels like you have entered a public toilet booth to take a dump, and before you enter you may have to wait for 10 seconds as they show you an ad. Looks like nobody sent them a memo on user experience and user engagements in 2010s.
Indiatimes.com the site that tried and failed at everything.
In keeping with the digital strategy in 1999 Times Group created a portal Indiatimes.com which was a cross between a directory, entertainment news, jokes, astrology, cricket and what not. It also became a vehicle for cloning the products of popular American technology companies like:
- Yahoo! (Indiatimes.com provided e-mail, chat and directory services)
- ebay (indiatimes.com provided reverse auction and other auction services)
- Amazon (indiatimes.com brought e-commerce in India in 2001, much before the Bansals of Flipkart)
- Priceline.com (Indiatimes.com had travel booking and similar sites)
- Match.com (indiatimes.com had online dating much before anyone else)
There is nothing that was not tried under indiatimes.com, but none of these products could be scaled by the management team as it lacked the entrepreneurial skills and vision required to take the products forward. Being a pioneer did not help indiatimes.com at all. Even though indiatimes.com shopping and travel were started in 1999 they could never be converted into successful ventures even after burning a lot of money and advertising in the family papers.
Times Internet startegy has been to copy everything in sight, so much so, it has lost track of what is what.
The copy cat culture at Times Internet is all pervasive as they copied every success in sight, they created Magicbricks.com in 2006 as a response to 99acres from Infoedge 2005 (even though they had property times in 1997), created timesjobs.com in 2003 in response to Naukri.com, created/acquired cricbuzz in 2004 inspired by cricinfo.com (cricinfo was acquired by ESPN in 2007). Created Gaana.com in 2011 inspired by the success of Saavn that launched in 2007. The folks at Times Internet are forever looking for inspirations to copy, unfortunately none of their clones panned out, as the copycats languished at 2nd or 3rd positions even after a lot of propping by parent sites and newspapers Times of India and Economic Times and other sister publications.
For the fiscal year 2019 Times Internet had a sales of $194 Million which was a growth of 9.4% from the past year and this was at a loss of $23 Million. An Internet company growing at less than 10% is more of a dying company than a growth company. By comparison Infoedge the company that has inspired Times Internet the most in the past, had a similar revenue at a profit of $40 Million and Infoedge products Naukri.com, 99acres.com are market leaders. Even the investment made by Infoedge are way superior when compared to Times Internet. Infoedge own 22% of Zomato and 19% in Policy Bazaar, both Unicorns among others.
The Vineet and cronies era
All these strategies were executed under Vineet Jain who used to advise the digital arm of Times Group and provide strategic guidance to the team. As you can see his cues were worthless. He and his team were unable to provide entrepreneurial spirit, strategy or even leverage from the Times Group, surprisingly some of his team members are advising VCs and startups on how to run internet businesses (or maybe how not to run internet businesses). Collectively the team failed many times over.
Internet companies thrive because of four things:
- People — Times Internet was never able to build a world class team to run the business, it was always 9–6 workers looking to catch the bus at 6 PM.
- Technology — Times Internet was not able to create any meaningful unique technology in its products, even today its sites don’t have any substantial personalization and their apps look like created by interns.
- Distribution — They failed at creating distribution beyond what came naturally because of Times Group.
- Revenue Channels — Even though they were pioneers and had an advantage of more than a decade, Times Internet failed to create a robust digital ad distribution network, and in fact is now dependent majorly on Google for ad sales on their own network.
Vineet and his team missed all the signs and all the opportunities that internet presented them between 1997–2010. If there is ever a disaster story on how to fail to capitalize on the opportunity of a life time between 1997–2010 is the story of Times Internet. How do you go from selling clothes in 2001 to growing at 10% a year will always be a mystery of our times!
The bumbling Damadji era: why the hell would the management operate from San Francisco when its primary audience is in India!
Around 2011 the era of disinterested Vineet Jain ended and the era of Satyan Gajwani, now the Mai-Baap at Times Internet started. He cannot be blamed for all the previous misses and mistakes as he only inherited this mess from Vineet Jain’s team in 2011 when he married Samir Jain’s daughter. The previous messes were all done much before he was even out of his school uniform, I would think. Satyan Gajwani ji was born and brought up in United States and after the Lehman crises when he lost his job, was asked to come and join the family business of Times. He joined and in 2012 was made the CEO of Times Internet at the grand age of 27. With him being culturally American and having an American world view he went about changing Times Internet. Some of the things that he said in a 2012 interview with Forbes gives an idea of what he wanted to do.
“I have the autonomy to make a big change in our culture and processes. It’s partially because I am part of the family.”
The company needs a shake-up, he says, one that a professional CEO couldn’t administer.
At the moment digital is a very small revenue stream for the Times group, but it is also a place where he can stand out. “Digital media is different from other media,” Gajwani says. “Most media companies suck at it.”
Though I have no first hand idea of what he tried to do to shake up things at Times Internet apart from recruiting from IITs (that’s first call of port for anyone wanting to make a ‘change’). Having known some old businesses and their management very closely, I can assure you, you cannot dismantle what is already there and tell people you are fools and I am here to take tell you how to do things. This creates a negative force inside an organization already struggling everywhere. You have to first prove that you are the worthy king before the subjects kneel before you. Damadji couldn’t do that. From what I understand Damadji’s team couldn’t fix the chronic problems at the old sites and couldn’t make the successful transition to the app world for most of its content and portal businesses, as the clones continue to trail the number 1 in the category and with many startups eating their lunch they are now being slowly edged out of the top 3. So much so that one of their top sites Magicbricks has resorted to data scraping from 99acres.com to bolster its listings. Unable to fix the old problems even after hiring Chief Strategy Officer Miten Sampat Damadji looked towards creating new projects to make a mark:
- MX Player
- Gaana
- TLabs
- Times global partner initiative
MXPlayer —To establish yourself as a leader in OTT Times Internet took one of the most unusual steps ever, it bought a media player that plays the media files that you download from the internet! Its like you wanted to create a porn site and you went ahead and bought a browser. But Times did exactly that, it paid $200 Million to buy a Korean media player with ostensibly a huge installed base in India. After buying it Times went about making it an OTT platform, one of the many in India and filling it with soft porn — the most popular genre in India, and probably the cheapest to produce. With top four positions occupied by YouTube, Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ chances of creating a subscription based soft porn OTT are very challenging, what with Queen of soft porn Ekta Kapoor, Alt Balaji still alive and kicking and Ullu App snapping at the heels. While accurate data may be difficult to come by, MX Player is currently in the top 10 of the OTTs in India. The business model of MXPlayer seems to be ads, and we don’t know what the future revenue models would be. Karan Bedi the CEO of MX Player claims:
“With our experienced team of storytellers, an exceptional technology product, and the support of the Times Group, we will play a vital role in transforming the sector and create new milestones in Indian content.”
Gaana — Though not originally created by Damaadji Gaana is one of the oldest products that has survived and has probably reached №1 after the acquisition of Saavn by Jio and double counting of Gaana subscribers under Gaana and MX Player. Now that bhai has amassed a fortune that he desperately needed, Gaana should prepare itself for an onslaught from Saavn. Spotify also has steadily gained market share of 15% in India and probably has already acquired most of the paying subscribers in India, leaving Gaana again at the mercy of ads to make up revenue. Having already sold a part of Gaaan to Tencent for $115 Million we don’t know what kind of interest Times Internet has left in Gaana.
TLabs — USA returned and returned back Damadji created a YCombinator style incubator in India inspired by Silicon Valley, under the brand TLabs. The incubator provided startups some cash and Times Group association for a stake in the company. Under this about 47 companies were funded till 2017 (I was unable to find results of 2018 and 2019 exercise and confirmation if companies were funded in those years). Of the 47 companies only 3 companies seem likely would survive and prosper. Reasons are not hard to see — unlike YCombinator which is staffed with experienced advisors and experts of their field, TLabs was/is being run by Bunty-Bubbly-Sonu-Monu type of advisors who probably cannot provide any advise on how to run companies and Times Internet providing advice on how to run businesses is quite rich in itself. YCombinator the source this was copied from, worked because it was run by experts who advised the founders, the money was incidental in the exercise, Razorpay, ClearTax and Meesho are some of the Indian companies mentored by YCombinator.
Times Global Partners — This is one of the Ripley’s believe it or not things pulled off by Times Internet, Times Internet advising Americans on how to run their businesses in India. So far Uber, Airbnb and a host of internet publications like Huffington Post, Business Insider, Gawker Media, Ziff Davis, seem to be the customers. Though I am sure Airbnb and Uber have moved away from this service long back and the initiative has hit a wall as reality dawns in America.
Apart from all this Damadji also wants to introduce American style news subscription services in India, news that Indians would pay for. If I can read fake news on the internet for free why do I need to pay to read the same news is beyond me. In my opinion for subscription news to be successful in India, the quality and depth of writing has to improve considerably, so don’t expect anything from Times stable to take off any time soon.
With Damadji the old problems of not having created own revenue channels and increasing dependence on Google and Facebook Network for revenue remains, with now the added problems of requiring cash to pay for cash guzzling OTT and Music app. At the same time the other old problems of distribution of copy cat sites and failing at the news app market remains as they were and which seems to have been abandoned while Damaadji chases OTT and Music Streaming. With Times Internet CEO Gautam Sinha and Mai-Baap Damadji operating out of Silcon Valley and hiring an Indian-origin Rishi Jaitly to sell India to Americans, there is now the added problem of being disconnected with India and Indians and Bharat and Bharatvaasis. I cannot for the life of me figure out why an Indian company with primarily Indian consumers have its management team sitting out of Silicon Valley?
With Corona the flagship of Times Group are now under severe stress, as advertising revenue plummets more than 80% and circulation drops precipitously, there is huge uncertainty over, if the circulation of physical papers would ever rebound to the pre-Corona level any time soon, thereby depriving Times Internet the sugar daddy it has so long fed off. With Chinese investments also being shadow banned layoffs and shuttering should begin soon at Times Group and Times Internet, as should a fire sale on some of its copycat digital properties.
Why should we care?
We shouldn’t, because this is a private company and has no public shareholding, so even if they are losing money spectacularly, its their own money and their own net worth. But as an analyst its fascinating seeing Times Internet with an early lead, access to pots of cash and an amazing brand of Times, unable to make sense of internet even after more than 20 years.
You can find me on Twitter at Manish Sharma .
