In midst of the dot-com frenzy, the easiest road to riches was through creating a website and selling it off. Today, we are all aware that the best means of entertainment for Telugu people is watching Telugu cinema. Hence most of the Telugu wannabes from the all corners of planet have jumped into the bandwagon with the sole intention of making quick bucks by setting up a Telugu cinema website and selling it out. But what they did not realize is the fact that they can reap the fruits only if they work hard and do the farming well. That is the reason why the web sites with sole intention of servicing the people are surviving and other sites, which are interested in reaping the benefits by burning a hole in one's pocket, are closing down.

It may look strange that even the web sites that have brick and mortar business back up are failing miserably online. The newspapers and cinema magazines entering the online business are failing to understand what the netizen is looking for. For any magazine or newspaper, it's a batch processing that is used for production. Where as, on the net, it is online. "Right here and right now" is the catchword for the net, which is intriguing those journalists who jumped into dot coms.

Another reason for the Capitalists, off late, not entering the web publishing business is the source of revenue. The only source of revenue for any web site until now is banner advertising and the amount generated through selling the ad spots on net is peanuts compared to the amount of effort and money that goes into maintaining the web site. Only those people who are not understanding the basic business model of net are entering the web publishing with the intention of making money are turning red in no time after realizing what net is giving them back in return.

Some of the people are talking about buying the Internet rights of the Telugu films and webcasting them using video-on-demand subscription. Net reaches the places where the regional Telugu channels cant. Watching a film on the 21 inch screen of a TV is luxury where as watching the same film on 120 x 90 size streaming window on the PC is sheer desperation where the film is relayed like a series of animated images. Big is beautiful, Right? With the kind of bandwidth our net offers, it seems unreal to have Telugu movies webcasted in the near future.

When the dot-com became a dot-con, where web ventures without business plan and revenue models went bust with international names like reel.com, boo.com, pets.com, etc. going bust, the reality hit the Indian shores. For instance, Suresh Production kicked off the biggest net venture an year and half ago (www.suresh-productions.com) by announcing that it would be catering to B2B service and also will have auctions of Suresh Production's valuable assets like dresses and props used by stars. In a few months that web site has bitten the dust. Touted as the biggest Asian Film studio Ramoji Film City too had plans of having a B2B portal. But the floated web site has resulted in another showcasing web site of Ramoji's brick and mortar assets.

Bollywood too has it's share of woes. . Jackieshroff.com is not going anywhere, Cineexplore.com is hemorrhaging money, Srkworld.com is in deep trouble and Myhrithik.com is still on the drawing boards.

Cineexplore.com (founded by Kajol and Ajay Devgan) a B2B portal for the movie industry, which was supposed to become the tool of choice for organizing shoots, has not even made a million rupees in revenue since its launch. With operating costs running into nearly a million a month, and its employees taking Kajol for a ride with castle-in-air projections, little wonder that it may shutdown soon.

Take another example of srkworld.com, floated by Sharukh Khan and Juhi Chawla. Fifty per cent partner in srkworld.com, the B4U Channel, is reportedly pulling out of the partnership. Bharat Shah, a major shareholder in B4U, had reportedly invested a million US dollars in the website. But things haven't been hunky dory for the channel ever since Bharat Shah was arrested on January 8.

Collars for service not dollars

idlebrain.com's sole intention is to provide quality service, not to make money. Our visitors might have noticed that we did not feature a single banner advertisement since its inception. We are driven by the passion for Telugu cinema, not by dollars. Each and every mail of appreciation and criticism from our beloved visitors rekindles the fire in us to perform well.

Idlebrain.com server crashed for a couple of days in January, which made us both happy and sad as well.
Happy because, our visitors per day doubled in the month of January by taking the popularly of idlebrain to the new heights and making us compete with Indian horizontal portals in terms of pageviews, not with the regional web sites. The downloads of Devi Putrudu trailer went into tens of thousands copies, which made our broadband host to temporarily stall the service for a while. Sometimes, we get punished for performing well.

We started a new chapter in Telugu movie coverage in this New Year. For us movie review does not mean writing a few lines. A movie review means giving out theater posters along with the sounds of the fans' hungama at cinema halls and the live dialogues in addition to critically reviewed synopsis. Our visitors received the latest Budugu series with a thunderous applause. We will continue to serve you with more and more new articles. Please guide us by giving valuable feedback.

Thanking you all once again
jeevi
editor ([email protected])
http://www.idlebrain.com
28th February 200