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Atul Kulshreshtha recognised the lacuna in this field in 2007 when he decided to venture into online teaching. The Noida-based chartered accountant is a serial Web entrepreneur, who started two advisory services portals in 2000. A few years later, he launched a BPO company, Cleave Global E-Services, which he sold last year. As he was comfortable with the Net and had the technical expertise, Kulshreshtha invested almost Rs 10 crore in setting up infrastructure, buying equipment and hiring teachers, before he finally launched Extramarks.com in 2008.
However, the going was tough initially. "Parents were sceptical at first, so we decided to charge lower fees of Rs 30-50 per hour, whereas they were paying Rs 300-500 for an offline session," says Kulshreshtha. Today, Extramarks.com has a support base of around 150 teachers and has 7 lakh students enrolled in various programmes. It has nine offices in different parts of the country and had a turnover of Rs 60 crore last year.
Creative angle
JOBS: Photography, singing or playing music, video content development, designing, voice-over options, editing and film-making
SKILLS: Expertise in any of the arts as well as good marketing, advertising and networking skills
INCOME: You may have to start for free, but sky is the limit once you establish yourself
Graphic designers, animators and Website developers have been using the Net to market their skills for years. However, the virtual world seemed to be limited to the artists who were technically empowered. What changed the status quo and provided the greatest impetus to the creativity of amateur artists was the launch of YouTube. Suddenly, you didn't need to have any expertise to be famous. Even a three-minute video clip shot with a pocket camcorder could get a million viewers, enough for serious professionals to wake up and take note of this medium.
If you couldn't make it to a reality show or a music company's illustrious office, you could compose your own songs and play it on YouTube. Gather enough eyeballs and the music industry would be beating a path to your home. Whether it was a favourite recipe, learning salsa or repairing a hard disk drive, you could make and market original content, and more importantly, earn money from it.
Hitendra Merchant joined this bandwagon in 2008 only as a means to get viewers for his online portal, desimad.com, which he had launched a year previously. However, within 5-6 months, he began receiving a sizeable income through the YouTube Partner Programme (YPP). The YPP lets you host YouTube channels and pays you from the ads that it puts up there. Realising the potential of this medium, he started various channels (similar to a Facebook page) on YouTube.
Merchant's 11-year experience across various media and entertainment companies, including Times Music,Nimbus, Idream Production and Saregama India, helped him with both ventures. "I started desimad.com to create spoofs of various developments in the country. I launched the portal only after I found a venture capitalist to back me," says the 39-year-old Merchant.
He hired scriptwriters, animators and voice-over artists to produce the spoofs. "I wasn't receiving enough traffic, so I decided to put up a video on YouTube, along with a banner for desimad.com, in the hope that people would like the video and visit the site," he adds. "I added more channels such as those on Bollywood and Hollywood by approaching stringers and paparazzi to provide me with exclusive content," says Merchant, who now has 30 channels on YouTube and 25 fulltime employees.
Exclusivity is essential as you won't get paid for copied or plagiarised content. The YPP pays about 55% of the revenue earned from the channel to the content developer and the balance to YouTube. Merchant's channels receive 25 lakh viewers a day and has a turnover of Rs 45 lakh a month.
An area that amateur photographers are leveraging is microstock photography, where you can sell your photographs and get paid according to the number of times they are downloaded. Some of the popular sites are iStockphoto, Fotolia and Shutterstock.
For instance, you can contribute photos for free on Shutterstock and can earn $0.25-28 (Rs 12-1,361) per image download. To attract potential customers, you must add keywords, titles and descriptions to your photos, which can be time consuming if you upload the pictures on various sites. The bigger your portfolio, the more you will earn. However, you will need to upload hundreds of photos for making a substantial income.
JOBS: Data entry, medical transcription, virtual assistance, online research and hosting online forums
SKILLS: Freshers can start with basic data entry and virtual assistant jobs, but you will need more experience as well as knowledge of the subject for the more skilled jobs
INCOME: Rs 1,500-1 lakh a month, depending on the working hours and experience
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