Digital India, Bharat Net initiatives key to expansion of social media: Study

With initiatives like Bharat Net aiding the expansion of broadband network in India, initiatives like Digital India are said to gain momentum, leading to the expansion of social media, an ASSOCHAM paper noted.

According to the paper, the Indian newspaper industry has a print order of about 62 million and the common households continue to read the morning newspapers.

However, the time spent on reading among the family members is witnessing a sharp decline, with social media platforms like Facebook leading the pack.

The paper also revealed that even though the men aged 50 and above prefer to read the newspaper, the youngsters are mostly busy on social media and get their news from there. Facebook, which has a huge share of the social media traffic, has a user base of 200 million in India itself.

While the newspapers print order is around 62 million and the TV viewership is nearly 780 million, a lot of traffic, especially from television content, would be shifting to hand held devices due to apps like YouTube, Netflix and Amazon's growing popularity among youngsters.

"Ironically, some of the unverified stuff passes as truth which remains an area of concern. However, as the new media evolves into maturity, hopefully, the users would become much more discerning in the way they would consume the information from the Internet," said D S Rawat, Secretary General, ASSOCHAM.

A majority of the newspapers have also gone digital, with individual articles and stories being circulated on the social media due to its widespread accessibility.