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Thursday May 15, 2008

The inside story on Malaysian Insider

COMMENT BY OON YEOH

Malaysian Insider, a bold attempt at creating a full-fledged online newspaper, is open to working with brand owners on innovative forms of advertising.


MALAYSIAN Insider, which emerged right before the general election, has become a staple of what I refer to as the “Malaysiakini crowd” – you know, the politically conscious, civil society types.

That it is considered a daily “must read” among political news junkies so soon after its launch is quite an achievement.

Right from the start, though, industry folks have been speculating about who’s behind this venture. If you click the “About” section, it lists veteran journalist Png Hong Kwang and former NTV7 COO Sreedhar Subramaniam as the co-founders of the company.

But rumours persist about the actual ownership of the company. Many people in the industry believe that the true backers are a politically well-connected public relations company and a former chief editor of a newspaper.

Sreedhar says funding came from his own pockets as well as those of a few friends who believe in his vision.

As for the rumours about the PR firm and the former editor, Sreedhar just smiled and said: “I don’t comment on rumours.”

He did comment on various other things though. He says he found the mainstream media to be too pro-government while alternative media tended to be too anti-government.

“We want to take a position on the middle ground,” he says. “I think there’s a need for someone to play that role.”

He was also quick to point out that although the focus today is on politics, Malaysian Insider was never intended to be a political news site.

“Our aim is to be an online newspaper, with different sections like business, sports and entertainment,” he says.

It already has such sections on the site but people don’t go to Malaysian Insider to read about entertainment. They go there for opinionated insider stories about what’s going on in the political scene.

Sreedhar admits that the bulk of the traffic is for the politics section but says that’s because the home page is currently featuring mainly political stories.

“Naturally, the political stories will get more page views,” he says.

He insists, however, that Malaysian Insider will not neglect the other sections and that in time they will become as strong as the politics section.

The company is still small right now, with about half a dozen employees. It’s actively hiring, though.

If you click on the button “Be a Malaysian Insider”, you’ll see they are looking for a deputy editor, news reporters, a re-write sub-editor, a sub-editor, an artist, a news videographer, marketing executives and human resource executives.

“Technology is cheap – we use open source,” Sreedhar says. “The highest cost is people.”

He’s ready for that though. When Sreedhar put together his concept paper for fund-raising purposes, he did something radical.

“For the financials, I only listed costs,” he says, adding that there’s no point putting down any revenue forecast as the pure advertising model for online media is Blue Ocean territory in Malaysia.

Malaysiakini, for example, relies on a mix of grants, subscription and online ads.

Besides, he wanted investors who weren’t afraid of investing in New Media, which are by nature long-gestation projects. That said, Sreedhar is not looking at a five- or even three-year horizon.

“I raised enough money to last 18 months,” he says. “I’ll know by 12 months whether we can make it or not.”

That’s an ambitiously short timeline for a brand new start-up relying on advertising as its only source of revenue (there is no intention to charge for content).

The key success factor may lie in its non-political content like entertainment and sports, which are more “advertiser friendly” than the politics section.

Sreedhar says that they won’t be relying strictly on banner ads and are open to working with brand owners on innovative forms of advertising such as incorporating the ad into the content. Not quite an advertorial, more like product placement.

To generate a lot of creative material, he intends to leverage on user-generated content. Not just in the form of reader comments but through crowd sourcing – a Web 2.0 term referring to the concept of getting the masses involved in the content creation process.

This could include video and audio. “We are preparing a platform to handle such content,” says Sreedhar.

He’s also open to the idea of paying for user-generated content, possibly based on popularity of the content, which is accurately measurable in online media.

Malaysian Insider is a bold attempt at creating a full-fledged online newspaper. This is a direction Malaysiakini took some baby steps towards with its Rentakini section but it has since come to terms with the fact that the reason people go to Malaysiakini is for politics.

People flock to online news sites not because they like to read articles off a computer screen but because they are looking for things that they can’t find elsewhere.

Malaysian Insider has managed to do that for its politics section, which is unique, relevant and really quite compelling. The big challenge now is to replicate that success for its other sections.

  • Oon Yeoh’s first local column was called Internet Insider. He can be reached at www.oonyeoh.com

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