On the counting day of the Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly elections 2017, Republic TV’s digital entity – RepublicWorld.com and Hotstar, where its digital videos are available –together garnered about 12.98 million minutes of consumption. Of this, 7.78 million minutes was consumed on RepublicWorld.com, while Hotstar contributed about 5.4 million minutes.
The broadcaster ran the campaign #Dec18WithArnab for the Gujarat elections.
Vikas Khanchandani, CEO, Republic TV, said, “On counting day, we had 7.78 million minutes consumed on Republic World digital assets and 5.2 million minutes on Hotstar, thereby delivering a massive 12.98 million minutes combined. This is a phenomenal video growth for Republic TV, though in all fairness to broadcast, the consumption for the genre will be very high when the data is released by BARC on December 28, 2017 for Week 51. We, at Republic World, are committed to building the largest news video platform in the country.”
Khanchandani also pointed out that the average daily watch time for the entire English news genre on broadcast is at 10.48 million minutes basis Week 49 data and 9.04 million minutes daily for the last four weeks average as per BARC in its core TG of 22+ Male AB All India.
The channel had a roadblock with TVS Tyres.
Though everybody is right now struggling with digital revenues, there is still some traction that the content providers and platform owners are trying for.
Khanchandani highlighted, “Video advertising is the fastest growing space within digital and is inherently native. This coupled with with server side ad insertion and data segmentation will enhance the advertiser offering. We will build immense value and impact for our advertisers and agency partners."
Republic TV has four types of content running on the elections. This included real time coverage of counting as the channel was live at 7 am. Another type was the integrated newsroom with live updates on TV and digital media (website and social media) and coverage in both English and Hindi. There were also patterns and correlations powered by Gramener, which helped present the developing news in a comprehensible and meaningful manner.