March - 2009 issue > Editor's Desk

By Harvi Sachar

With over a billion users, today Internet is arguably one of the most successful technology implementation ever. Content and services provided through Internet play an integral part of everyone’s life in U.S, whether they interact with it directly or not. However, business effect of Internet has been mixed. Free content available through Internet has had a devastating effect on print media industry with some newspaper or magazine shutting down every day. Now, this effect of free content seems to be coming a full circle and websites where the main source of revenue is online ads are feeling the pinch. Pubmatic, which offers online services to publishers, estimates that cost per thousand views of display ads on big Web sites sold through ad networks fell 54 percent in the fourth quarter compared with the year earlier. Along with a down economy, here problem is also of oversupply. Billions of content pages are being created with explosion of user-generated content, thus adding to the inventory available for selling ads. It’s going to be increasingly difficult for pure play Internet companies, where main source of revenue is advertising, to maintain or build up their revenue.

However, Internet as an enabler is an entirely different story. It has created whole new industries like Software as a Service and Online education. Our cover story of the month, Yugma, is one such company. It’s a second-generation company in online meetings, which has made use of new technologies to produce a better product at a fraction of cost of existing players. We saw the demo of the product while interviewing for the story and were using it to run our own meetings in a few hours. It helps that it’s already available as Skype add on to 250 million users.

We also present 10 Internet companies to watch out in 2009. They range in business from digital marketing services to monetizing online games to matching freelancers with work to matching people with electronics to lifestyle marketplace. As always, we would like to hear your thoughts and feedback. Keep those emails coming! Harvi Sachar Editor-in-Chief harvi@siliconindia.com

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