Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The Google-Facebook duopoly

It will take more than a couple of well-placed old media firms to break it

Six of the top 10 "news and media" sites in India are from mainstream media brands - NDTV, The Times of India, Dainik Bhaskar among others - according to SimilarWeb, an analytics firm. While revenue numbers for many are not available, Rs 100 crore plus is what some of the bigger brands, NDTV, Times Internet, are doing online, going by their annual reports. Virendra Gupta, founder of Dailyhunt, one of the biggest online news aggregators, claims it will hit Rs 100 crore in fiscal 2017. Most of the other big ones would be in the Rs 10-30 crore category.

It would seem, therefore, that mainstream media firms are better placed to monetise digital than the newer apps and websites in India. What has the experience been in other markets?

Ken Doctor, president of the US-based Newsonomics, points to Business Insider, Vice, Vox, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, among other new media sites. "They have large audiences, yet only Vice is profitable," he says. "The others operate on an edge. They've been driven by the belief that growth itself would provide a big payout. Today, all face the same truth as legacy news companies."

And the truth is that the Google-Facebook duopoly now takes 85 to 90 cents of each new digital dollar spent, and over 70 per cent of all those dollars in the US. And their share of the market is growing worldwide. "Relative crumbs are left over for both digital native and legacy news companies," says Doctor. "That's reflected in the recent Guardian cutbacks, the small constant ones at The New York Times as well as by the wholesale jettisoning of staff by regional dailies in the US." But he also reports that, "both The New York Times and Washington Post have now surpassed BuzzFeed and Huffington Post in overall digital audience for the first time in years. That's a new sign of the times".

In India, too, Google's YouTube walks away with roughly two-thirds of all the advertising money spent on digital video. And both Google and Facebook are the dominant sources of traffic for many of the newer apps and websites serving news. But NDTV gets less than seven per cent of its traffic from social media, a bulk is from search and direct-to-website. This then improves its ability to monetise its brands.

There are several arguments against the notion that mainstream media is better placed to monetise online, the biggest being focus. NDTV or The Times Group are exceptions. Most groups have really not got around to focusing hard on making online a revenue stream. On the other hand, the newer sites and apps - Inshorts, Dailyhunt, The News Minute - are flush with venture and private equity money and have fire in their belly. They are building serious scale. Dailyhunt, for instance, is already at four billion views a month; Inshorts is at a billion (against two billion page views for all of Times Internet, going by its website). Inshorts regurgitates 300 mainstream stories of 60 words each every day and keeps taking that number up. Dailyhunt simply aggregates from across different Indian languages. But as they grow in scale, several newspapers and TV firms are cutting off content feeds. Several aggregators don't care; they simply rewrite the stuff. But that may not always be possible with video. So their content costs could go up in the future.

You could argue that NDTV or Indiatimes too, are dependent on the mother ships for content. Strangely enough they aren't. NDTV, for instance, gets less than 10 per cent of its online content from the mother brand. Much of what it has built online - Gadgets360, Smartcooky, CarAndBike - is for a different online audience. Times Internet, too, has tied up with global firms such as Huffington Post, Business Insider and Advertising Age to good effect.

Much of this is a positive sign for the digital ecosystem, in general. But it will take more than a couple of old media firms doing well online to break the Google-Facebook duopoly.

Twitter: @vanitakohlik