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Digital Media India 2020
Digital Media India 2020: Driving news to profitability
9th edition of WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media India conference in New Delhi takes place with the theme Growing Big in Digital.
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The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) hosted the 9th edition of its Digital Media India (DMI) conference in New Delhi this year, with more than around 110 news media executives from over 10 countries.
The conference, whose theme is ‘Growing Big in Digital’, was held on 18 and 19 February at Holiday Inn, Aerocity in New Delhi. The digital event brought together ideas on digital trends, technology, advertising, innovation and revenue strategies.
Juan Señor, president of UK’s Innovation Media Consulting Group, got things rolling with a keynote address on driving a news media business to profitability. Señor presented fourteen business models and one single strategy to transform a newsroom into a reader first model. This strategy is based on the ‘Innovation in News Media World Report’ that he authored for WAN-IFRA in 2019. “A newsroom should deliver content worth paying for. Everything that generates value should generate revenue,” he said.
The two-day conference covered a range of topics dealing with the news media business such as digital and programmatic advertising, video and OTT space in India, subscription strategies and transformation.
The first day of the conference covered digital advertising and alternate revenue sources for the news media business, discussing, in-depth, how a publisher can drive their business to profitability. Gone are the days when the biggest revenue source of a media house was advertising revenue. Partnerships and alliances between publishers are the new normal; as is content syndication, e-commerce, podcasts, sponsorship and events.
Puneet Gupt, the Chief Operating Officer of Times Internet Ltd., in his presentation on ‘Monetising in the times of change,’ urged publishers to find out what content readers are willing to pay for. “Once you’ve figured that, create resources to provide that content to the reader. Quality of revenue should be a factor in deciding how a news media company monetises. A brand must consider ‘direct sales vs programmatic sales’, ‘brand solutions vs standard advertisements,’ ‘reader revenue vs advertising revenue,’ and ‘revenue from syndication vs on-site revenue’,” he said.
Day 1 of the conference closed with the South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020, which saw more than 80 entries from over 20 media companies. An international jury comprising high ranked professionals from the media industry chose 34 winners for the fifth edition of the awards. Manorama Online bagged an award for the ‘Best News Website’, while BBC India won the ‘Best Data Visualisation’ award.
Key Notes :
> More than 110 news media executives from over 10 countries attend. > The event brought together ideas on digital trends, technology and advertising, innovation and revenue strategies. > The two-day
conference covered a range of topics.
The second day of the conference covered the road ahead for digital journalism and explored if digital content is a bubble waiting to burst. Siddharth Varadarajan, Founding Editor of The Wire said that it is not a bubble. “A lot of growth is still possible in digital journalism, specially since the source of credible content is drying up,” he said.
Rupa Jha, Head of Indian Languages of BBC spoke of video becoming a major content consumed on digital media. “India is high on video consumption. The way ahead will be vidoes on investigative stories, experimentation with technology, and collaborating with independent studios and people in business,” Jha said. “Having data to guide our content strategy is very important” she added.
The conference also covered the over-thetop (OTT) scenario in South Asia and the threats, challenges and opportunities that accompany online streaming in the region. The Indian media market currently hosts more than 30 over-the-top (OTT) players. The country is expected to overtake South Korea in the next five years to become the world’s eighth biggest OTT player.
The conference ended with a conversation between Navaneeth L, CEO, The Hindu, and Ritu Kapur, Co-Founder and CEO, Quintillion Media, India. According to a KPMG survey, by 2030 the digital consumer is going to be non-English speaking, mobile-phone user and increasingly willing to pay for content online. “The consumption of regional news is far higher than the consumption of English news in India,” Navaneeth said. “India is largely a mobile first market. As far as paying for content is concerned, Indian media has given away far too much for far too long for far too little. There is a sense of entitlement among consumers that media has to be free.”
The event is supported by Asian News Media Focus, World News Publishing Focus, gxpress.net, RIND Survey, Indian Printer and Publisher, Press Ideas, ePatrika and All About Newspapers. It included an expo with five exhibitors from both, India and abroad
displaying their products and services for news publishing industry.
The ‘Print Your Future’ project has officially begun, with coordinators Intergraf and UNI Europa Graphical, and representatives of focus countries (EE, DE, NL and PT) meeting last month for the kick-off meeting.
Between February 2020 and July 2021, Intergraf will co-coordinate a project under Social Dialogue about the image of print, attractiveness of the sector and recruitment. The project will focus on four countries: Estonia, Germany, the Netherlands and Portugal. Project documentation will be translated into 8 languages (EN, DE, NL, EE, PT, FR, IT, ES).
Recruiting young people to the printing industry is consistently identified as one of the primary issues experienced by both education providers and printing companies. Part of the reason for this is a lack of attractiveness based on an out-of-date image of the sector. The ‘Print Your Future’ project aims to help improve this situation by developing a new sectoral identity, creating a toolbox for recruiters and holding events (‘Young Workers Days’) to promote our sector. The project will also include a website with a repository of public communications materials.