As the world around us changes and converges on the mobile phone, one of the industry’s most open to disruption is the media. Not just because content is the first port of call for internet users but also because with the advent of social media & the internet — distribution is not in the hands of TV networks and newspapers alone.
It is said to be more democratic and presumed to be more meritocratic. However, what both these things mean is questionable –especially since populism trumps honest reporting / credibility and one sided narratives can easily go viral. And as we know if enough people begin to believe in something, it becomes the truth.
Keep in mind that these trends are not necessarily only reflective of any media outlets popularity but also their grasp on digital marketing.
Most English channels seem to be struggling to gain popularity amongst Indian smartphone users, by comparison their Hindi counterparts are generally faring much better!
In terms of Net Promoter Score too, the Hindi Channels fare better than English ones:
Yup, Times Now is doing pretty miserabally. In fact I think it’s the first time, we’ve published a negative NPS. Just felt ‘the Nation’ might want to know.
English Media also suffers from the fact that its consumers have many many potential sources for news consumption. Not Excluding social and other aggregator apps. For consumers of Hindi News, the sources available are still thin (despite including social), they tend to search first for the names they know best. These happen to be the from the mainstream media, but as time goes by — I am quite sure that will not be the case for long.
There are a whole host of startups that have managed to proliferate to even larger audiences than the players mentioned in this newsletter. Many of these remain undiscovered, simply because they are not part of our ‘ecosystem’.
At KalaGato, we are in a unique position of seeing how this world is evolving on the mobile and will try over the course of the next few weeks to offer a glimpse in to this evolution.
Thanks for your time,
Ashish Kapoor
Team KG
P.S. BARC Data can vary substantially from mobile metrics, take a look below for a snapshot of the same:
