I wrote an article in Dec’18 for the online tech + business site factordaily.com called ‘Vernacular Apps, English Premium, and Monetizing the Next 200m Users”. The link is below.
In the article, which I am not posting in full here, I argued for why the slew of vernacular apps that have been launching of late, catering to the emerging …
(This was published in Mint, 19th November 2018, albeit in an abbreviated form due to space constraints. This is the complete piece.)
The latest and hottest startup sector is presently invisible to ‘People Like Us’ living in metros. Over the past year, several young founders boasting impeccable academic credentials and work experience have been moving to small town India, launching hyperlocal news apps, viz., LocalPlay, Lokal, Awaaz, Circle etc. These …
Recently, The Guardian, that long-struggling liberal newspaper of record, stated it has ~500,000 members and digital subscribers[i]. Not to mention another 300,000 one-time contributors. This is quite impressive. What is more, the rapid increase in members and subscribers is projected to help The Guardian cut losses to £25m this year (£45m last financial year[ii]), putting it on course to break even by 2019.
What is …
Facebook’s India arm reportedly made Rs 177 crs revenue in FY16, the last year for which it reported revenues. In the same period, Google India made Rs 5,904 crs. Google is thus about 33x Facebook revenues in India.
For the year-ending Mar’17 we will very likely see a lower multiple, for Google may not grow as much as Facebook in India, given its higher base. Let us assume …
In 2017, Group M, a leading media agency, estimates that we will see marketing expenditures cross the $1 trillion threshold for the first time ever. This includes about ~$550b of advertising expenditure or ‘Above The Line’ i.e., print, TV, digital, radio, OOH etc., and balance ~$450b in marketing services, primarily ‘Below The Line’ spends e.g., direct marketing, events, activations such as tasting sessions within a mall as well as buying …
Mint, a financial daily from HT Media Group, went from a Berliner to the larger Broadsheet format today.
Why did they do this?
Mint’s Executive Editor R Sukumar explained the change here. In the article he cites only one reason; that the earlier Berliner format was better suited to carrying longer in depth investigative pieces (“more of less” as he calls it). Today, he says, consumers prefer to get …
Twitter recently announced its Q1 2016 results. While its revenue grew by 36% to ~$600m, and losses halved to ~$80m, the numbers didn’t impress Wall Street analysts or tech pundits. After all, revenue growth is slowing, audience numbers are barely moving and there are newer more exciting kids (snapchat, medium etc) on the block. The stock dropped as much as 13% on the news, and is now trading at its …
Let’s face it: 2015 wasn’t really a great year for media companies. From television majors that saw cord-cutting making a sharp dent in their valuations to online players that saw the looming threat from ad-blocking impacting the flow of advertising dollars, there hasn’t been too much good news this year.
And if we take news media – the smaller subset of the media industry that we call home – then …
Historically, all content was created for a bundle.
The bundle, as seen for magazines and newspapers, was designed keeping in mind, a dual-revenue stream, one, albeit larger from ads and the other from readers. In the case of newspapers, the bundle also presumed some degree of exclusivity of readership (read monopoly) and thereby the need to cater to a wide range of customers.
Thanks to the high profitability that these …
I have a colleague who uses twitter in the most peculiar way. He only tweets @-replies to brands with whom he has a service grouse, in an attempt to get them to respond faster. He has pioneered an interesting use case for twitter as a ‘public’ email service.
This is not something that could have been visualized by anyone at twitter when it was launching, nor something that is kept …