The rise and rise of digital news: Three insights that shaped the growth

Of the 405 million Indians who were online in December 2019, more than 393 million consumed news. Times Internet, Network18, and the India Today Group remain the top three digital publishers in India.

Video has played a huge role in this growth. YouTube remains the preferred partner for news video. Anywhere from 50-100 per cent of the growth in views for the top five publishers comes from YouTube. That, among other facts, is what comScore’s list of the top digital publishers in December 2019 and its ‘Trends in Online News Consumption’ report released earlier reveals. The trends report covers the data from September 2018 to September 2019.

The top 10-20 firms remain the same with some shuffling. It is their growth which is eye-popping. The India Today Group, which runs a clutch of sites such as Aaj Tak, Lallantop and others shot from 87.34 million unique visitors/viewers in January 2019 to 153.4 million by December.

Network18, which operates CNBC, IBN and other brands, shot to 201.7 million unique users, up from 105-odd million at the beginning of 2019.

The trends report offers several insights into the shape of this growth. Here are three:

One, news aggregators are becoming powerful. Of the 282 million unique visitors that news attracted as a category in September 2019, 158 million unique visitors came from aggregators, with Dailyhunt leading the pack. That is up from about 60 million in 2018.

Two, in September 2019, Indians spent an average of 191 minutes per visitor on news sites, compared to say 352 minutes in the US or a mind-boogling 667 minutes per visitor in Finland. Also with over 90 per cent of the traffic coming from mobiles, India remains, by far, the leader in online news consumption on the mobile. China’s mobile news consumption is marginally higher than India’s.

Three, within languages, Hindi leads. It gets 192 million of the 282 million unique visitors to news sites in September 2019. Marathi and Malayalam are the other strong languages. Much of this is probably a function of what is available. Hindi, Marathi, and Malayalam have strong online brands from Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar, Malayala Manorama, among others. Their group firms feature routinely in the listing of the top 50 digital publishers in India.