By William Fellows
On24, the web site that offers audio/visual news streams free to an audience of individual investors is building out its partnerships in such a way that it can characterize its business as a broadcast network. We’re not a web site, we’re a network, says president and CEO Sharat Sharan, it’s not about audio/visual, it’s about a different media.
What Sharan’s gearing up for is the realization of On24’s model with the widespread availability of broadband internet access. Only then will its streaming feeds of syndicated and some original financial news and analysis become a real value proposition for the majority of individual investors that are currently struggling with 28.8Kbps access. On24 estimates half of its users are at 28.8Kbps now, the other 50% are above 56.6Kbps. Even so it figures many users access its services from the workplace and will continue to do so. On24 seems to have arrived at the right time and place though, test driving its model against an audience of US consumers desperate for the web, for technology and for stocks and shares.
Sharan is effectively saying the company has to maintain a web site because at the moment users will often need to find a homepage to find more On24 content and more than anything else it needs a structure for the database which holds its audio, visual and textual material. It’s not religious about its web site.
Sharan has struck deals to make On24’s news clips available to users of Excite, Etrade, Quote, Snap, Earthweb and others and claims another portal deal it will announce in a couple of weeks should extend its reach to over 35 million web users. He’d rather investors click on to On24 content on partners’ sites and is offering free links to On24 from anyone’s site. In six months time it will be able to offer a completely personalized MyOn24, enabling vistors to create their own On24 channels using ticker symbols.
When a user clicks on the news item, a window which includes a streaming media feed is opened through the browser. This, Sharan says, means that a user is virtually at the On24 site whether they physically click through to it or not. Where it does not host the content directly it sends clips to partners as XML files on an hourly or daily basis via FTP or email.
On24 owns the window real-estate in which the clip is played. It makes money from advertising and sponsorship of streams. It also sells space on its site for companies to place their own information and for advertorials. It claims it already has 50 customers paying $30,000 each for this privilege. However Sharan’s big challenge will be rolling out a series of subscription-based premium services which are being planned. Used to free content, will On24 users be prepared to pay for their clips?
On paper On24 would appear to be competing with broadcast.com, vcall.com or bestcall.com, but Sharan says it’s clear that the investors’ conference call has become commodity. And how many individual investors have time to listen to every conference call? he asks. On24 rounds the information up for them. His 15 reporters contact key analysts in the market sector and aggregate their opinion, offering soundbytes of analyst opinion. Already covering the sell and buy sides of the internet and networking industry industry, On24 will shortly extend its coverage to reach 70% of the IT market, as well the bond and mutual fund markets. Thereafter it will move beyond IT.
Currently it does little investigative reporting of its own, on average one story a day of the 65 or 70 it publishes daily, it admits. It expects that number to rise to 150 items a day quite quickly as it adds more journalists. Sharan expects On24 to be able to ride out the wave of consolidation among the financial news providers so that it can have a crack at the broadband market.
Sharan, former VP and general manager of Hearst New Media and Technology who launched women.com and also lead the Houston Chronicle on to the web, has raised $7m in a first round of funding for the 1998 start-up; he expects to be looking for more in the second half of next year.
VP programming Mitch Ratcliffe, a veteran of Ziff-Davis web site creation and other web companies, says the company wrote its own publishing system to support 20,000 to 50,000 concurrent video streams, which is hosted on Sun kit by Frontier Communications. Vignette and Broadvision simply couldn’t cut it, Ratcliffe says.
