There is still scope of growth for the print media with it creating market-specific strategies and also new revenue streams, panellists at the Ficci Frames conference concurred.
“According to the latest Indian Readership Survey (IRS), just 4% readers of the overall readership base read news online. This proves that there is still scope of growth,” said NP Sathyamurthy, executive director, DDB Mudra Group, and chairman of the technical committee at the Readership Studies Council of India.
As per IRS 2017, newspapers added more than 110 million new readers since the last survey conducted in 2014. The total readership in the last three years grew 40% to reach 407 million in 2017. The total readership base stood at 295 million in 2014.
Talking at a session, ‘Past perfect future tense? Catalysts and pointers for the print industry’, Sanjay Gupta, CEO, Jagran Group said to drive further growth, a newspaper needs to have different strategies for separate markets. “For example, in case of a market where a newspaper has just been launched, the focus has to be on increasing circulation compared with an existing market where a newspaper needs to concentrate on retaining readers,” he said.
Gupta went on to say that one of the reasons brands still prefer to advertise in newspapers is because unlike TV, where a viewer/reader can change the channel when an ad is shown, in print she reads the ad, along with rest of the content.
Devendra Darda, managing director, Lokmat Media, pointed out that newspapers will have to create additional revenue streams. “With no scope to increase cover prices as well as number of copies, sponsored content and events have become additional revenue generating streams. Losses would increase if newspapers increased the number of copies,” he said.
On the threat from digital, the three panellists agreed that digital will play a complementary role to print as against perceived to be a competitor currently, thereby leading to generation of additional revenue.
According to Sathyamurthy, print still accounts for a large share of advertising revenue, while digital’s contribution is just 7% in case of newspapers.