iLeher » Widget Marketing: Can Dhingana pull it off? Catching the Internet Wave in India

Widget Marketing: Can Dhingana pull it off?

Written by: Madhur

On Apr 17th, 2007

[Update: Interesting discussion in the comments section! Added a sample live Dhingana widget. ]

A recent case study on YouTube emphasizes the role that widget marketing played in the phenomenal growth of YouTube as a destination site for video sharing. YouTube was not the first mover in its space, but in a market that was fragmented and plagued with sites with poor user experience, it quickly made inroads with its innovative widget based marketing and social networking features.

Dhingana is one site to watch out for in online Indian music streaming space. We mentioned briefly about them here. The current incumbents Raaga and MusicIndiaOnline (both among most visited Indian sites) hardly seem to be doing any innovation at all. Dhingana is a refreshing change in this space and with their simple interface and rich features that promote stickiness and viral spread, I think they are moving in the right direction. Although a word of suggestion for them is it would be nice to avoid displaying those bright flash ads smack in the middle of the page that according to me hurts the otherwise nice user experience that they provide.

Talking about the new features, at Dhingana you can add tags, categories on songs, create smart lists. Another cool feature is their recently launched widgets which users can put up on their sites and share their smart lists with their site visitors, just like people share youtube videos on their blogs/sites. This is one viral feature, which if takes off can go a long way in making their brand a common place and eventually help make Dhingana a destination site for all Indian music needs. From the point of view of business, this also helps them create an infrastructure which can be useful to do deals with other sites that wish to provide streaming music on their site and even make money (with revenue sharing deals). We talked with team dhingana about some of these features. Find a below a quick excerpt from the talk we had with them around their launch of music widgets. Feel free to share your thoughts and ask questions about Dhingana’s strategy as they will be happy to answer some of them for us. Here is a sample widget

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;!– End of Dhingana’s 360Widget code –&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

1. Can you give us a quick overview about how the new widgets feature that Dhingana is launching will work?
Dhingana’s 360Widget is like a sleek battle tank . It ‘s designed to be extremely light but at the same time loaded with a lot of features. 360Widget is a plugin that users can embed in their webpages/ blogs to showcase personal favorite songs as well as current chartbuster Indian songs. Visitors of the pages can listen to these songs if interested. Thus, web page owners / bloggers can express their musical likings through the widget at the same time, potentially make money out of this. More details here.

2. Are you doing deals with any Indian sites to use your widget and do revenue sharing etc.?
3. Why would users want to use your widget on their sites/blogs? Are you targeting any particular group of people/sites? What rate of adoption from users do you expect?
Let us answer 2. and 3. together. Well, Dhingana is a site where you can musically entertain yourself, it caters to your musical buds. Our 360Widget will allow a site or blog owner’s users to do the same. So by embedding this widget on your blog or website, it can add a new dimension to your blog, where people might like to listen to the owner’s SmartLists or some nice music while they enjoy reading your blog or website.
One can compare this widget with Flickr’s Photo widget or Yahoo’s news widget. People normally embed a Flickr Photo Widget to showcase their own photo albums. Similarly like-minded people can choose to embed 360Widget to showcase their own SmartLists and in turn allow their users to share songs and smartlists with their friends.

Second reason, which is the more interesting one, is moving forward we have a revenue model in the making where the blog owners can choose to embed audio ads in their widgets. Once they do this, Dhingana can share some percent of the revenue from these audio ads with the bloggers. However, we are still researching around this model and depending upon its feasibility, we positively plan to integrate it in our 360Widget. Once this goes through, we definitely plan to partner with other sites.

4. Infrastructure can become the bottleneck if this feature really takes off and spreads virally. I am sure you realize this - how do you plan to address this?
We always make sure that we operate at 50% of our streaming bandwidth capabilities. This means that if our users are consuming 1000GBs per month, then we atleast have 2000GB bandwidth capability. This allows us to be always prepared for sudden growth or surge in user base.

In addition, to start with we are just allowing our registered users to embed this widget on their sites and blogs. Once the widget goes out of beta phase, we plan to make it available to non-registered users as well.

5. Anything else you would like to share with our readers?
Dhingana’s approach has always been to create a niche for itself through innovation and technology. We want to add value by enhancing the music listening experience of users and add the “feel good” factor to their experience by allowing them to express and share their likings. We know that users like our work, and we are thankful to them for their even greater support as they are spreading Dhingana’s name by the word of mouth.
We love surprises and we are sure our users like them too!  Stay tuned as we have loads of exciting features in pipeline to take the music listening experience to the next level.

Sphere: Related Content

Entry Filed under: dhingana, online music, online radio, online streaming music

14 Responses Add your own

1. vivek garg said on April 18th, 2007 at 2:39 am

Do we have any estimates on how much an audio-ad on raaga/dhingaana etc sites pay? I am curious about the numbers that will make this whole widgetry successful.
2. Rajendra said on April 18th, 2007 at 3:34 am

Nice post. Dhingana is moving in the right direction. I find your post incomplete though. How can you write such an post on dhingana widget and not include a sample widget on your site…that could have helped a lot in getting a better picture and seeing an actual demo.

Cheers!
3. vslog said on April 18th, 2007 at 4:34 am

The widget seems an excellent idea, but I am struggling with the execution.
“people might like to listen to the owner’s SmartLists or some nice music while they enjoy reading your blog or website”?? - why would I care about a blogger’s choice of music?
Embedding ads within music sounds even worse

Music sharing works between friends, especially when they are build around tastes. How about
- letting users share their list through social networking? make a widget for myspace. gtalk or any other messenger?
- let users share a song through email / chat when they like a song.
- the reason the viral piece works so well on youtube is because discovering good stuff has a lot of value and is worth sharing with friends. Help users discover (new or offbeat) music, and make it easy to share
4. Dhingana Team said on April 18th, 2007 at 10:28 pm

Hi vslog,

Those are really interesting questions. Please find our comments below:

The widget seems an excellent idea, but I am struggling with the execution.
“people might like to listen to the owner’s SmartLists or some nice music while they enjoy reading your blog or website”?? - why would I care about a blogger’s choice of music?

This widget has 3 modes to it. If the blog owner wants to show off his favorite collection, then he can use this widget in SmartList mode. This works more like Flickr photo widget - you display your albums to your users. Alternatively, the blog owner can also chose to keep “Top 10″ mode as the default category for his widget. In Top10 mode the users can have access to the current LIVE Top 10 or random songs from Dhingana. This works more like a Yahoo News widget - which news are hot or latest. So users know which songs are being listened too and enjoyed most by Dhingana music community at any given time. Either ways, the 360Widget will always give the users access to all 3 modes with a single click - SmartLists mode, Top 10 mode and Random mode.

Embedding ads within music sounds even worse

Well, it won’t really sound worse if you are getting a revenue share out of the songs which are played from ur widget But anyways, if one does not like this idea, he can chose to embed the widget without the audio ads too. Again we are researching this area extensively, so we may or may not add this feature. We are also researching around a mutual advertising model, where we can display the blog owners ad on Dhingana.com and match the unique views for their ads for the unique views of our 360Widget on their blog.

Music sharing works between friends, especially when they are build around tastes. How about
- letting users share their list through social networking? make a widget for myspace. gtalk or any other messenger?
The 360Widget is already ready for this. One can embed it on any social networking site, provided they allow embedding any kind of widgets. We are working on a functionality to directly embed the 360Widget on blogger, facebook and such sites, directly from Dhingana. So users will not even have to copy and paste the code themseleves. We definitely have plans to look into widget development for Desktops and messengers moving forward.

- let users share a song through email / chat when they like a song.
We already have a nice solution for sharing albums, songs and SmartLists through email. Dhingana’s mGreetings does just that. You can learn more about it here:

- the reason the viral piece works so well on youtube is because discovering good stuff has a lot of value and is worth sharing with friends. Help users discover (new or offbeat) music, and make it easy to share
That is true. We are already working on another kind of widget which will directly allow our users to embed a song, a SmartList, an album or any playlist for that matter on their blog or website or any site that supports widgets. This new widget will directly embed a skinned down version of Dhingana player which is more on the lines of YouTube as you have referred above.

So to sum it all up, we are designing widgets in different ways, to cater different users and different kinds of audience. At the end, we are interested in adding that extra dimension to Indian Music community in the best possible way we can.

Dhingana Team.
5. vivek garg said on April 20th, 2007 at 3:25 pm

I listen to songs on Raaga all the time and have to sit through those horrible audio ads.
Its great to have choices but sometimes having too many choices can confuse your user. I would like to see a simpler story and branding of these offerings.
6. Dhingana Team said on April 20th, 2007 at 5:00 pm

Hi Vivek,

Firstly, we can help you eliminate those audio ads and give you 3-4 times better music quality. Also we are extremely scared of pop-up blockers and hence we have no pop-ups

Ok back to the main questions and topic now Ever since we introduced DhinganaColumns we have received several emails from our users that they just love it because they get to hear what the Indian community feels is good to their ears. Hence, while designing our widget we wanted to keep an easy access to DhinganaColumns. Eventually, we decided to add 3 modes to the widget so that we can cover all aspects - user generated smartlists, community favorite top 10 and community top rated random songs. We believe that it is better to have things accessible then not have the choice atall. Also, our users can always select the “Default Page” they would like to set for their widget. So they can always chose to have ‘Top 10 Marathi songs’ as the default page or have ‘My SmartLists’ displayed by default. A blog owner might select a default page as per his likings, but the users can always have that extra choice to look around and hence those extra tunes accessible. Now, thats how we see it.

Coming back to yours, do you think it would be more helpful if we allowed users to embed to widget in only 1 mode (if they want) to make it dead simple and eliminate all those extra options? Or do you have any particular suggestions?

We are all ears!
Thanks,
Dhingana Team
7. Vivek Garg said on April 20th, 2007 at 6:21 pm

I dont have anything specific. Just wanted to put out a word of caution when I saw too many choices.

‘good to great’ - tyranny of ‘OR” can be solved by genious of “AND” ?

As Jim Collins notes: “highly visionary companies liberate themselves with the ‘genius of the AND’ and no longer settle for either or.”

but the ‘genius of AND’ should not become a nightmare for the customer in terms of too many choices.
8. simran sethi said on April 21st, 2007 at 6:44 pm

I really like the sound quality. I like the play lists and widgets as well. I discovered new songs like ‘Hey Shona”.

I noticed couple of things:
l. I like the song but I had no idea what movie it is from. And there was no easy way to find that out. I was browsing ‘Ta Ra Rum Pum’ when I found my song.
2. Now I wanted to know who is the music director/singers.

This type of meta data should be readily accessible to the listeners of the song within the widget itself. I remember seeing scrolling text in some of the songs in the widget. May be that can include interesting trivia about the song and the movie. Also user submitted comments etc. That would be nice.
9. Dhingana Team said on April 22nd, 2007 at 2:07 am

Hi Vivek,

We are also working on designing a second widget, which will allow our users to embed any particular song, SmartLists or any playlist for that matter in their website or blog. So this widget will directly embed a skinned down version of Dhingana Player on your blog or site - like YouTube embeds a video player. It will be dead simple. This will allow us to cater to both types of audiences. Please who like it dead simple and extremely flexible (embed any playlist) can use the widget with Dhingana Player and people who want more advanced features with all modes together can use the 360Widget.

Cheers,
Dhingana Team.
10. Dhingana Team said on April 22nd, 2007 at 2:27 am

Hi Simran,

We are glad to know that you liked the sound quality and the widget. If you decide to embed it in your blog or site please send us the link as we plan to list (direct link) a few early/power users in our blog pretty soon. To answer your concerns:
1. I like the song but I had no idea what movie it is from. And there was no easy way to find that out. I was browsing ‘Ta Ra Rum Pum’ when I found my song.
Surprised to hear that! Actually the access is really easy. We have a CD icon next to each song. If you click it, it will take you to the album, which that song belongs to. Actually to make it even easier, we just added a message “Check out the entire album” which will show up in the center of the widget when you hover over the CD icon.
2. Now I wanted to know who is the music director/singers. This type of meta data should be readily accessible to the listeners of the song within the widget itself. I remember seeing scrolling text in some of the songs in the widget. May be that can include interesting trivia about the song and the movie. Also user submitted comments etc. That would be nice.
Definitely. When you click the CD icon you will go to the album page for that song. This page should display all the meta data for that album like music director, movie cast and singers for individual songs. We are always working hard for adding all this meta data for all our albums. The approach we follow is get the songs out as soon as possible and then fill up the meta data as soon as we can. Eg: Check out the albums page for movie Don
Moving forward we also plan to have most of the meta data accessible from our Dhingana Player making it even more informative for our users.

Cheers,
Dhingana Team.
11. Dhingana Blog » 360Widget - Listen Dhingana from your own blog or website ! said on April 27th, 2007 at 7:45 pm

[...] Madhur’s - iLeher.com Madhur has written an interesting blog on Dhingana’s widget here. He has also added 360Widget to his blog post in Top 10 mode with Movies as the default category. [...]
12. Dhingana Blog » Interview with iLeher.com said on May 9th, 2007 at 6:59 am

[...] You can read the complete post here.. [...]
13. shilpa said on May 10th, 2007 at 4:05 am

i want to download songs from dhingana and install this player. is this possible
14. Dhingana Team said on May 10th, 2007 at 8:07 pm

Hi Shilpa,

At present we do not offer downloading songs from Dhingana. But we will definitely consider this possibility moving forward.

In the future, we definitely plan to work on a player which you can download and install on your machine and enjoy Dhingana right from your PC.

Cheers,
Dhingana Team

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