Interview with Rajesh Barnwal - AlooTechie.com
By Arnab April 19, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous, Internet Marketing, Newsletter, Interviews
• Could you start by telling us your Name, Primary Website(s), Age, Sex, Address, EMail Id.
Rajesh Barnwal, AlooTechie.com, 33, M, Delhi, rajesh@alootechie.com
• Please give us some information about your Qualification & Experience Background.
PG Diploma in Journalism from Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi
Former Group Head, Content, Webchutney
• In your own words, what is your Primary Business ?
AlooTechie is my business, passion, hobby, whatever! Right now, we are not concerned about the Revenue Model. That will come later. Our immediate focus is how best to keep the Indian online industry people updated about whatever happening in the country’s internet space. We believe that if we do it right AlooTechie will have enough readers to make it a successful business. Remember that advertisers/marketers follow the media be it TV, print or website where people are. So if you want to attract advertisers’ money, focus on attracting and retaining more and more users to your venture. And if you do it well, money shouldn’t be a problem!
• If you can share with us, how much do you earn from Online Marketing Activities, and how long did it take you to get here. Please also mention, how much time you spend in a day on an average on these activities.
We are earning goodwill of the AlooTechie readers, whose number is growing day by day. And this continuous growth in our reader-base and their overwhelming appreciation are what we value most… A year ago, when I used to introduce myself as the editor of AlooTechie people would invariably ask “What is AlooTechie?” But one year down the line, their first question usually is “What is your Revenue Model?” AlooTechie.com was launched in September 2005. To say that I work 24 hours a day, seven days a week on AlooTechie will not be fair either to me or my passion (AlooTechie), for I do spend some time with my wife, Sulekha J
• How did you get the idea of starting on this path?
While working at Webchutney I realized that there was no single news-source offline or online which would focus just on the happenings in the Indian online industry. Of course, there were enough websites providing news and views about what’s happening in US, UK or Australia, but India, it seemed no one was interested. So I decided to fill this gap in my little small way. And soon people started appreciating my efforts and the rest is…
• What obstacles did you face initially, and how were you able to counter them?
The major challenge, I won’t call it obstacle, was how to present AlooTechie as a serious news source and not as a just another web-presence. For that I decided to be as objective in my news coverage as possible. I have received feedback that I don’t talk about my personal views on the site. But that’s a deliberate decision. And I don’t see it changing in the immediate future at least till I gain enough understanding of the industry to provide valuable inputs from my side. Here I have no qualm in saying that AlooTechie is more a news site than a blog!
• What are some common mistakes people make in Internet Marketing?
Giving a damn to user-experience! I will point out just a single online practice that I noticed recently to drive my point. And that is refreshing a web page automatically when a user is mid-way reading its content! This is done to display more banner ads and also to artificially increase page-views so as to impress silly marketers who still talk about page-views!
• What aggravates you most about this industry?
The absence of a third party audit to help online marketers know the exact number of users that a website has! Right now, a website can claim that it has 1 million registered users and 100 million page views a month! And marketers are clueless how to verify the veracity of the claim. I wish the stake holders would come together and do something to have our own version of TRPs (TV Rating Points) that enable traditional marketers in deciding how best to spend their money on TV.
• Anything else you would like to add…
AlooTechie has just launched a Job Board to cater to the Indian online industry. We have been receiving feedback that as the internet industry is growing it’s becoming more and more difficult to hire senior level professionals. And that posting vacancies on general job-boards often attract people who have little domain knowledge or experience of the internet space. It was felt that since AlooTechie is read mostly by people working in the online industry jobs posted here might be able to yield better results! Now that we have acted on the valuable feedback, let’s see how well AlooTechie Job Board helps online companies to find the right people who could take the industry forward!
Digg This!
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Yahoo! My Web
April 20th, 2007 at 11:25 am
“What aggravates you most about this industry?
The absence of a third party audit to help online marketers know the exact number of users that a website has! Right now, a website can claim that it has 1 million registered users and 100 million page views a month! And marketers are clueless how to verify the veracity of the claim.”
Every thing you presented was very good and mativational to web masters, but I cant agree the above because…. a good example is the Rating providing my Alexa.com , we can see approximate visitors in sites
April 20th, 2007 at 10:50 pm
But the question is how do we rate the traffic and what kind of mechanism should be adopted for this purpose? any clues
April 21st, 2007 at 12:35 pm
I want to take this opportunity to congratulate Rajesh on the great work he and the entire team of alootechie have been doing. Alootechie has become a part of our (myself and several other industry people that I know) everyday life. I wish Rajesh and the alootechie team all the best for the future.
April 22nd, 2007 at 8:36 am
Hi,
Arnab: Thanks for publishing my interview on your site.
Sakyasingha: Thanks for the best wishes. It’s great to know that AlooTechie has become a part of your life.
Sachin, Asrmurthy: We know that Alexa provides an indicative figure of a website’s popularity. But Alexa rankings has a limitation in the sense that it tracks activities of only those internet users who have downloaded Alexa Toolbar. And the number of such people is not substantial. If the same service were provided by more popular Google/Yahoo Toolbar, the data would have been much more reliable. Better still, if IE/Firefox browser were to integrate website popularity tracking service…But I am not sure if this would be welcomed by internet users.
April 22nd, 2007 at 3:06 pm
I will agree to Rajesh that Alexa can give only indicative figures since it only uses the Alexa toolbar to analyze the web traffic and then determine the ranks. I personally do not know anyone who uses Alexa toolbar in my group (mostly from software industry).
Another important thing is that Alexa can only be downloaded for Windows platform and IE 6.0 or newer browsers. There is no toolbar from Alexa for highly popular browser now days called ‘FireFox’ though there are some other fixes, toolbar developed by others are available but who would take that much pain. I certainly didn’t ;).
However Alexa is still an option to get an idea about popularity of the website but as Rajesh has mentioned that the real solution will come from all big players coming together (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and browsers supporting collection of data automatically as long as it doesn’t hurt the privacy of people.