The Empire strikes back: How print media is winning the internet

Focus on what the brand is all about and how you want to monetise it are two things that are crucial if print media wants to tackle the internet

Gautam Sinha, a soft-spoken techie, joined Times Internet or TIL in 2007 as chief technology officer. Soon after Satyan Gajwani, a part of the promoter family, took charge as head of new media in 2008, Sinha became chief operating officer and then CEO in 2016. The idea was to put technology at the centre of the internet arm of one of India’s largest media firms.

TIL was to be a products company not a digital or media one. It had been trying to chip away at the internet since 1995. This was its big gambit and it worked.

In February 2019, Times Internet had Rs 1,300 crore in revenues and a claimed 450 million unique users globally. Much of the credit goes to its uncanny ability to use analytics to increase the revenues from each user. comScore data, which varies from what the industry shares, ranks TIL among India’s top 10 publishers.

In the same list is The Express Group. Its flagship The Indian Express is about a tenth of The Times of India in readership and just like The Times it had been attempting the internet since the nineties without much success. In 2012, Anant Goenka, scion of the promoter family, took over as head of new media. Going by an IIM Ahmedabad case study on the group, its digital revenues stood at Rs 1.12 crore in March 2012 and traffic was 2 million uniques. By March 2019, the Express Group hit 148 million unique users across seven languages and just over Rs 60 crore in revenues. All of this at a nice fat operating margin. “We have never lost a rupee on digital,” says Anant Goenka, executive director, Express Group. The digital brand is bigger than Express ever was offline.

Cultural transformation, tech-orientation and focus are what is common to The Times Group, Express, Vikatan, Delhi Press, Malayala Manorama among the scores of print media firms that are finally winning the battle of the internet. They are getting audiences and managing to find ways of making money in one of the fastest growing internet markets in the world.

In 2018, there were over 482 million Indians online with Rs 16,900 crore in advertising revenues chasing them. But like all other global markets these revenues are totally dominated by the Big Two — Google and Facebook. Since the Rs 30,550 crore print market continued to grow and remain profitable most publishers had put their internet arms on automatic pilot.

That changed in the past three years. Print revenue growth slowed to a crawl even as there was a tenfold rise in data consumption online fuelled by Jio’s launch in 2016. “We know where print is going to go — Indian media has seen what is going on in the west. We have a great brand, good content, good people, that has to be translated to a new generation,” says Jayant Mathew, director, Malayala Manorama.

Kerala’s favourite newspaper has found success with its sharp, focussed products like M-Kids, an online paper for kids and MQuiz, that gets 20,000 people playing online every night. It is currently at 19 million uniques.

What works for each of the publishers is different. 

Why print is cracking the internet

TIL gets its traffic and revenues from three sources. There are information products such as Times of India online, ET Now; entertainment products like Gaana and MX Player, two of the largest music and video streaming services in India; transactional services by apps such as Dineout or ET Money. “The whole focus is to increase the ARPU (average revenue per user) at a network level. On a cricketing day, the audience on Cricbuzz is the cheapest to acquire, once it comes in we try to move it to transaction sites like Dineout,” says Sinha. Every time you book a restaurant through Dineout, Times Internet gets a commission. This affiliate revenue alone brings in roughly a third of its topline. The idea is to reduce dependence on advertising to a little less than half by 2023.

The Times’ case illustrates two of the three things that are crucial if print media wants to tackle the internet — focus on what the brand is all about and how you want to monetise it. TIL decided to be this big, overarching digital brand — others had different ideas.

“The (Indian Express) brand means something to users — credibility. That clarity helped me with decision making while fighting in a commoditised market. A lot of people were throwing lot of things on the wall and seeing what sticks, we throw fewer things. We are very clear that we will use accuracy over speed,” says Goenka. It also found its brand of thinking, questioning journalism was getting huge amounts of traffic from the Northeast, Bengaluru and other areas where its print product was never available or weak. So it set up bureaus in these places. Much of this paid off as traffic has surged.

This focus could be also about how a brand wants to make its money. Delhi Press is a small publisher with seven magazines — four of which are among India’s most read. Each of its brands — Saras Salil (small-town, men) Grihsobha (for women), Caravan (literary),  Champak (kids) — has a very specific target audience. It started looking at the internet seriously only in 2017, after the promoter family broke the company up in two parts. At just over 3 million unique, the numbers are small currently. But to Anant Nath, director, Delhi Press, two things are critical — the fact that half of this traffic is direct and that Caravan already has 3,000 paying subscribers. “The utility of a magazine is not reach but quality of content. Advertising as a source of revenue is not working (online) since 80-90 per cent goes to Google and Facebook.”

For Delhi Press then the whole focus is about getting people to pay online, the same price that they pay offline.

But…. 

Since print is still largely an owner-run business, all this focus works only if there has been a buy-in and involvement from promoters. Content from The Times Group’s print brands brought in just about 7 per cent of its online traffic: at Express it was 20 per cent. It is tough for print barons to see their main brands as non-stars online. Their whole business model rests on ensuring that their brands are in the top 20 on readership and circulation charts and get advertisers to buy in on that. However on both revenue and content, online forces the business to shift totally to the reader. 

That is where the last common factor among the successes is important. Gajwani at The Times, Mathew at Malayala Manorama or Goenka at Express are the next generation and not hung up on the past.

“One major cultural clarity we had was we think of ourselves as a B2C (business to consumer) and not B2B (business to business) company,” says Goenka.

That, in fact, is true for OTT apps too — a B2C orientation works far better online. As Sinha puts it, “The cultural change is the most important one. We visualised this in 2011 and knew it would take 5-6 years to drive this cultural transformation. The competition is young, smart, reasonably well-funded. To defeat it we need to be as hungry as them.”