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Learnings from Bollywoodmasti.tv

By Jitin Pillai on 4 Comments / 3365 views
Happy New Year Rodinhoods! May 2016 be the year you make your $millions & $billions 🙂

Sharing few things we learned while building Bollywoodmasti.tv in last 4 months. Quick background – Bollywoodmasti.tv is a content blog where we aggregate and create all Bollywood related content. This includes movie reviews, celebrity gossips, bollywood fashion review, video mashups, memes and much more. Basically all the stuff youth loves reading today. In 4 months since we started, close to 1million users have visited our website and we are clocking over 800,000 monthly page views. On Facebook alone we have 100K likes and over 1million weekly post reach. All thanks to our 7 member strong editorial team based across major cities in India.

While we were building this we saw some patterns emerge on how people are consuming content. Thought this might be interesting for those looking to build out their content strategy. Here’s what we learned –

  1. Age of Spoon fed content – Content is king, people want unlimited content yet no one is looking for it. People don’t visit content websites directly anymore. Even for established brands their time is limited. Figure out ways to deliver it directly (psst.. social media is one way)

  2. Search is dead – even the habit of searching for content is on the decline. SEO/SEM won’t matter anymore (exceptions could be videos, movies, songs)

  3. Social Media is ‘THE’ platform – forget App only or Browser only, Social Media (SM) is the next platform.

  4. Optimize for social media ‘WEB’ – Recently if you have opened any link from FB or Twitter, chances are it must have opened in an embedded in-app browser. Here they conveniently strip out ads (in some cases) and recommended articles. Twitter is worse. The idea behind this is SM folks don’t want you to go astray digging further into these websites, they want you to return to your feed/timeline. Mostly even the users want the same – they want to read the article and they want out. Keep an eye for this and figure out what could be done

  5. Focus on uniqueness of content – nobody is interested in news, almost every single blog to publishing media reports news. Understand your audience, their preferences & likes and create content which they will love. Double down on the patterns

    • Along with traditional stats like page-views, sessions, visitors.. also measure engagement stats each post is generating. Start with likes, comments, etc and then move onto more detailed metrics like weekly post reach and engagement out of total reach. Remember, its different for different SM networks. Should be able to convince these numbers to advertisers or any business prospects.

    • Optimize content for SM audience. Always be thinking how you will stand out among all the content overload. Boy! especially if its bollywood its tough job

    • Love or hate Facebook for what it does, but its the only friend you got. It has reach, audience and tools. Also do expect them to play spoilsport, so be on guard to work your way around it. In the past FB has abruptly changed their policies, limited reach and doesnt approves ads for various reasons. Be prepared and find ways to get it done.. never complain. Embrace the thought its going to be this way, thats capitalism at work (and be thankful)

    • We decided to focus only on one SM (FB) and would suggest same to all those starting out. You can also leverage Instagram, Snapchat & Tinder (yes!)

    • Buzzfeed & 9gag both built their empires on social media. Read about them

  6. Click baity headlines – are you allergic to click baity headlines which goes like ‘xyz may Shock you’ or ‘5 reasons why..’? See a doctor. They are here to stay.

  7. Rich media – In today’s uberized world, no one has much time to read articles. Make videos & photos a central part of your content 

Note

  • I haven’t made much distinction between mobile & PC web. Its 2016, so this shouldn’t be a question at all

  • Most of our users are within the age group of 18-28. So our insights are limited to it

*We had started Bollywoodmasti.tv with the intention of building a Netflix for India (had a different angle though). Very soon realized the multiple levels of challenges in doing so and decided against it (Alok had a role to play in this). However while we were working on the movie streaming app we had started a content blog for promotional activities of the product. Even though the main project was shut down we decided to keep the blog running due to good engagement. What followed was something interesting 

Links:

you can follow me at @pseudo_jedi and our Bollywoodmasti.tv at @bollymastiapp

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4 Comments

  1. interesting insights jitin! thanks for sharing.

    would love to know your suggestions for trh. 

    if you’re coming on the 16th we should catch up!

  2. Thanks so much Asha for allowing us to share our learnings.

    I am travelling to Toronto on 17th, so would be difficult to attend TRH on 16th. But as always will be catching up with the action on Facebook & Twitter.

  3. Cheers to the team. 🙂

  4. Thanks Aniruddha 🙂

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