By Emmy Abdul Alim
“What we are trying to do is to keep the physical business profitable and chase digital dreams, because this (print advertising revenue) is not going to continue forever,” Navaneeth told participants at WAN-IFRA’s recent Asian Media Leaders Summit in Singapore.
The Hindu Group operates eight publications with 30 editions and 15 digital products, supported by around 2,500 employees.
While the circulation base is very large, and accounts for around 30 percent of revenue, it is also stagnating. Further, the percentage of circulation revenue to total revenue is small because of very low cover prices, according to Navaneeth.
Advertising accounts for between 70 and 80 percent of revenue but this is becoming unreliable, fluctuating based on what’s happening in the economy, he added.
“It’s difficult to build business models around advertising alone,” Navaneeth said.
To navigate the transition from print to digital revenues, six years ago The Hindu Group put its content behind a paywall. In India, the yearly All Access Pass is priced at Rs 2799 ($33.09).
Its e-paper, a digital replica of the print version, accounts for half of subscription revenue.
The company found it difficult to build a subscription business when the Indian digital news ecosystem was still largely free. However, once the Group made the leap, it saw the ecosystem slowly getting behind paywalls.
The Hindu Group’s digital revenue contribution is growing by up to 40 percent year-on-year, and constitutes single-digit or small double-digit of The Group’s total revenues, he added.
Navaneeth believes Indians have come to see the value of content. For The Hindu Group, this is based on the trust that its journalism has earned over more than a century.
“To me, giving away content free is a sense that you don’t value your content,” Navaneeth said.
Navaneeth underscores the importance of having editorial, tech and business teams work together.
“Historically, many media companies have worked in siloed approaches between the journalist side of the business and non-journalist side of the business, but I think with digital becoming more important, product tech, data and AI teams becoming important, they need to work closely together.
“So if product is owned by journalists and services are owned by business, I think it’s the intersection of product and service where value is created, there you create monetisation,” Navaneeth said.
A multifaceted approach that includes events, educational products
Beyond subscriptions, The Hindu’s approach to digital is multifaceted.
The group also leverages print relationships for revenue streams like educational products and events.
It runs three products for children of multiple age groups, and some of these products are delivered to schools and act as teaching aids.
“We also realised that in this day and age when kids are constantly on their mobile phones, quality time between kids and parents is shrinking, so we have a product, which is all about curiosity, delivered to homes on Sundays when parents and kids can spend time together,” Navaneeth said.
This “Print Plus” approach also extends to organising events that are able to attract sponsors and audiences that have built relationships with The Hindu over many years.
The Hindu has also captured digital opportunities beyond traditional news products, understanding that where the first filter of print is geography, for digital it is segmentation based on areas of interest.
“The Hindu is known for its language and lot of people in India grew up reading The Hindu for learning English as a language. So we saw adjacencies in that and we have a large business called Step which trains people in English speaking and English writing,” Navaneeth said.
The group also, in 2014, launched real estate platform RoofandFloor that delivers content, community and commerce on a single platform. It has also branched out into organising property shows.
The digital opportunities are vast and they can be scaled, according to Navaneeth.
“You could do new verticals like around games, health, etc.,” he said.
Going global to increase digital subscriptions
For The Hindu Group, the next frontier is to boost its presence on the world stage via its International Edition that is a separate e-paper product that gets international subscriptions.
“The role of the International Edition is to help the world make sense of India and to present a world view through an Indian prism,” Navaneeth said.
International subscriptions will help drive The Hindu’s digital revenues, which will need to be ramped up in the next eight years as advertising revenues dip, according to the CEO.
Currently, digital revenues are not able to make up the gap created by drops in advertising revenues. Navaneeth gives the example that if advertising dips in the high single digits now, the 30-35 percent growth in digital is not able to offset that drop.
“I think the trick is to get the print business far more efficient, get higher realisation cover prices, and reduce dependence on advertising,” Navaneeth said.
For this to happen, the CEO wants to see The Hindu Group reduce its reliance on advertising to 50 percent and focus on growing digital revenue to “get it to a 10x” in seven or eight years’ time.
“India is an emerging market and a strong market and as interest in India increases, we have a global opportunity,” Navaneeth said.
About the author: Emmy Abdul Alim is a news and content professional with more than 15 years of experience as a reporter, journalist, writer and editor. She currently works independently training journalists across Southeast and South Asia, and she also writes and edits for major daily newspapers, corporates, government agencies and non-profit organisations operating both at home (Singapore) and across Asia, the Middle East, and the United Kingdom. She was previously an Editor at Refinitiv and Thomson Reuters.
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