Localising of internet: A peek into state-wise consumption of online media

There is no national media brand.

Malayala Manorama (Malayalam) and Rajasthan Patrika (Hindi) are popular outside their home states. However, Daily Thanthi (Tamil) and Lokmat (Marathi) are not. The Indian Express Group, NDTV, Network18, almost every major online publisher has a bigger presence in Delhi than nationally.

These are some of the insights from a study, “State Level Clusters in India”, released by media measurement and analytics company Comscore earlier this month. The study offers the first ever peek into state-wise consumption of online media and brands.

Comscore data usually looks at desktop plus mobile consumption. “There are more than 450 million Indians online, but half of them are in the big five state clusters,” points out Ramanujam Pobbisetty, sales director, Comscore (see charts).

The report is an illustration of the axiom that media is the most local of all products. It re-emphasises that people prefer to watch news, movies or drama in their language and the context they are familiar with. That is why newspapers and TV channels in local languages do well.

The internet takes this a step further. It enables localising with a granularity that TV and print can’t and proves once again that in a market as heterogeneous as India there are no national brands.

One look at the variations within over-the-top (OTT) platforms tells you that. While most OTTs do well in Maharashtra and Goa, Amazon Prime Video is more popular in Uttar Pradesh and Telangana. Hotstar, on the other hand, is popular in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in addition to Maharashtra and Goa. That is because kabaddi is very popular in the South and Hotstar owns the rights to the Pro-Kabaddi League.

Similarly, the reason Malayala Manorama is popular outside of Kerala is because it serves a significant number of Malayalees living in West Bengal, Delhi and Tamil Nadu.

The implication? The strength of a brand or a genre in some states and its absence in others is an indicator of where media companies and marketers need to focus their efforts on, says Pobbisetty.