DIGITAL WILL FOLLOW TV ROUTE: GYAN GUPTA

BY IMPACT Staff

Recently, dainikbhaskar.com became the No.2 news website in the country according to comScore. Gyan Gupta, CEO of Dainik Bhaskar Digital, tells Abhinn Shreshtha that figuring out the right metric is very important on the digital medium and this can only happen when advertisers, agencies and publishers sit down and talk things out.

Dainikbhaskar.com, the flagship Hindi website of the Dainik Bhaskar Group, was recently adjudged the No. 2 news website in the country by comScore. According to comScore numbers, Dainikbhaskar.com has 24.3 million unique visitors and 378 million page views. It also continues to be the No.1 Hindi news website. Here, CEO of Dainik Bhaskar Digital, Gyan Gupta tells us how the DB Group is approaching the digital medium.
 

Q] It must feel great to become No.2 in the online news category despite being a non- English player.

Language (other than English) is going to become bigger and bigger in the digital ecosystem. The importance of content in different languages is going to increase and this (DB.com becoming No.2 news website) is an indication that it is happening. It is important for content in different languages to increase, otherwise we are not going to be able to reach the entirety of the country, where local languages are spoken.
 

Q] So, what would you attribute the success to?

We have been working on the content, discussing with the editorial team, understanding how digital and mobile audiences are different, how to treat the headline, the copy, for digital, etc. We have also put in work on the product side. Now, the websites are faster, quicker; we focus a lot on the user experience.
 

Q] What is the digital strategy for you?

The digital strategy for us is largely about understanding what the audience is looking for, in terms of content and information and how do you give it to him in a nice, intuitive and faster manner depending on the device he/she has. Beyond this, we also look at how the advertisement and the user experience will play out.
 

Q] Talking of advertising, what are the challenges and opportunities that you see as a non-English digital publisher?

A couple of years back, advertisers would tell us that they were not looking at Hindi content. But advertisers will go where the scale is for them to make any campaign successful; it is not about the language (whether Hindi or English). If you look at Print, if they want to go to a metro they will probably choose English, but if they want to reach out to a Jaipur or Bhopal audience, they will choose Hindi. Language is something that we overplay, but for the advertiser, it is only about the audience quality and the reach. As and when vernacular language provides them the reach, which it should on digital, I think digital would probably follow the TV route rather than the Print route - there is no reason why advertisers will not show interest.
 

Q] When you say digital will follow TV, you mean in terms of reach?

Yes, in terms of scale. Also, in digital, other languages will have a major role to play rather than English. Digital is a mass medium but how does it reach 500 million people? It will only happen if we get those 300 million who are speaking local languages online, otherwise the medium will be restricted. Today, if we are looking at digital being a 150 million audience medium, estimates suggest that 50% of this audience speaks local languages and this percentage is only going to increase. When we talk about adding new people to the Internet, the growth will come from the local language population and Hindi forms about 60% of this number.
 

Q] Can you tell us a bit about the different properties in the DB Digital stable and what is the monetization strategy?

We have nine properties with five being the most prominent --dainikbhaskar. com, divyabhaskar.com (Gujarati), Moneybhaskar.com, which is also the third largest business website, Fashion101. com and Dailybhaskar.com, which is in English. Then we have smaller properties like Bollywoodbhaskar.com, DBcricket.com, Jeevan Mantra, etc. As of now, the largest revenue sources are dainikbhaskar.com and divyabhaskar.com.
 

Q] Videos are the latest craze. How do you leverage videos at DB Digital?

We have DB videos, started about 10 months back. We have our own team, our own studios and we produce our own videos. We started with news bulletins, which work really well for us. We also produce a lot of videos around specific content depending on breaking news, Bollywood news, etc. Video for us is very important, we are focussing on it and we feel video will be a great way forward. From a user perspective, bandwidth still continues to be a challenge but audiovisual is the way forward. This actually connects to my previous point of digital being more like TV. Once you go audiovisual, the whole language barrier goes away.
 

Q] Can you tell us how you are approaching the mobile medium?

Mobile is becoming huge for us. Around 60-65% of our entire readership is already from mobile and by the end of the year, it should be around 75-80%. We are trying to figure out different monetization models on mobile.
 

Q] Can you tell us about your business objectives, going forward?

We still have a lot of milestones to cross. Creating a more sticky and better product for the consumer is a very clear business objective for us. In terms of new product launches, we are working on a few things but I am not sure whether we will launch them this year. The larger focus for this year is to adapt to the mobile experience.
 

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