Chakpak Gets Funding From Canaan – A Look At Canaan’s Internet Investments
Canaan Partners has funded Chakpak an entertainment and bollywood centric community site according to this article. The amount is not disclosed as yet but the news is confirmed. This is the third company in the consumer internet space that Canaan has invested in. The earlier two are Bharatmatrimony and Techtribe.
As far as talks in the industry circles is concerned both their earlier investments seem to have hit a rough patch in recent times. While bharatmatrimony was in the news recently for laying off people techtribe on the other hand hasn’t had much apparent success in monetization of the tech community via job referrals which is their core revenue model. Also with the slowdown.. jobs as a space has taken a beating and hence the jobs space which looked very promising a few months back looks extremely dismal now.
Same is the case for Clickjobs which is again a bharatmatrimony company and there was news of it looking for a strategic partner for sometime now and denial of it being shut down.
The only saviour for Canaan in both these businesses seems to be bharatmatrimony.com as marriages will probably be the least hurt by the slowdown as per industry sources. Even Consim Info’s (The company behind bharatmatrimony) other businesses like Indiaproperty would see a slowdown soon with the property market being hit.
Techtribe on the other hand needs to rework its monetization model and our sources tell us that they are already working on it and should be out with something early next year.
Coming back to this new investment by canaan in Chakpak.com. I first heard about chakpak through their early stage investors erasmic which is now Accel India. I must say they seem to have been doing very well on the number’s front. One look at their homepage and you would know that a vibrant community around entertainment and movies is building at chakpak. But the question of monetization still remains for chakpak as well. The top banner ad on their homepage being a google ad banner tells a story on how its difficult to crack direct advertisers and VC funded or no there is no difference if you see it from an advertiser point of view.
All in all advertising seems to be the toughest form of monetization in this space and Canaan which had earlier not invested in an advertising based business. Both Consim Info and Techtribe had transaction and subscription driven models. Given that even those businesses seem to be suffering at the hands of the slowdown Im not sure how chakpak would fair. One thing is for sure though the VC’s money will help chakpak to ride this downturn and be ready when the upswing comes around in a couple of years.
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