Bloomberg|Quint, India’s premier business and financial news company, has gained over 100,000 organic subscribers for its WhatsApp news service within a few weeks of launch. As may be recalled, Bloomberg|Quint had announced this first of its kind offering in the business space in the country towards the end of 2017. The service connects users to comprehensive daily coverage of global and domestic business news, market movements and trends. Interestingly, users also can check real-time stock prices and use hashtag based search for trending news categories. This milestone makes Bloomberg|Quint the first player in the business space to have successfully deployed a chat-based, mobile-led news delivery model at scale.
The subscriber base of this WhatsApp service reflects the overall premium consumer base of Bloomberg|Quint, which comprises of top CXOs, entrepreneurs, professionals and policy makers. 30% of subscribers of this service are iPhone users as compared to the national average of 3.12% (Source: Statista.com, December 2017), 60% users come from large metro cities and belong 25-45 years working age group. And this audience is highly engaged with every user on an average reading over 12 stories from (Source: Google Analytics).
As a brand, Bloomberg|Quint reaches more than 3 million monthly users across its site and partner platforms. More than 50% of Bloomberg|Quint’s audience comprises of ‘Senior’ executives, professionals and entrepreneurs (Source: LinkedIN Audience Center For Publishers). With a strong emphasis on user engagement and interactivity, this WhatsApp service forms part of Bloomberg|Quint’s suite of ‘opt-in’ services including the much acclaimed BQ Daily Newsletter, the ‘All You Need to Know’ podcast, notifications and more. Cumulatively, these services already engage over 2.5 lac users daily.
Commenting on the success of the WhatsApp news service, Anil Uniyal, CEO of Bloomberg|Quint, said, “We are very excited by the rapid success that our pioneering WhatsApp service has seen. From the outset, our approach has been to build an integrated, digital-first product and this is a key milestone in that direction. What is even more heartening is that this subscriber growth has been garnered organically, through referrals and word of mouth and these users are an engaged base of premium decision makers. We aim to scale this product as well as add to the suite of services for our users.”