‘How news publishers can achieve better CPMs and a better ROI’

New Delhi: “People who speak regional languages do not pay for news subscriptions,” Durga Raghunath, Head of News Partnerships, India and SE Asia at Google busted this myth as she took to the stage at the India Digital Summit to discuss unlocking regional potential for news publishers in India.

The session also saw the participation of Gaurav Arora, Chief Operating Officer at Jagran New Media who started the session by mentioning the challenge of news monetisation in the country especially among people who speak regional languages.

Weighing in on the discussion, Raghunath said, “We have been working with Kantar for two years, and in one of our studies, we found that the Indic language news user is the most premium user amongst language users. When you compare the news user on parameters such as utility behaviour, subscription, e-commerce payments, and premium smartphones, the news user is top of the pack. From a broad perspective, considering 8-10 top languages, we are witnessing an explosion of multi-modal queries across search, YouTube, and every Google service. Voice, lens, image, and text have unified, removing all constraints and thresholds in terms of quality. 

This presents a great opportunity for bilingual publishers, as constraints like English to Hindi, English to Tamil, and Hindi to Tamil are dissolving, creating a new universe of internet content. Over the next 2 years, we will see this new universe of regional content emerge.”

Moving on, Raghunath shared her thoughts on AI and the technology that will be used in media from an advertising perspective and how news publishers add more value to advertising campaigns and deliver good ROI.

While discussing how news publishers can increase their share of ROI, Raghunath highlighted a problem about news publishers not using analytics to capture the user behaviour on their platforms and said “News publishers have only been able to capture 10% of user actions on their platforms, possibly due to intimidation or lack of education about what users can do. The analytics have not been properly set up by publishers. 

The first step is to identify the 20 loyal actions on any news platform, whether it's an app, website, channel, or platform. By capturing and focusing on these loyal actions, publishers can signal premium engagement and increase CPM. As engagement, time spent, and content sharing increase, the quality of advertising and its value will improve significantly. In addition to positioning news users within the language ecosystem as premium, it's crucial to provide data and signal feedback that convinces advertisers of this premium status.”

Journalists and AI

As the world shifts towards multi-modal forms of communication, such as audio-to-text and image-to-text, users are becoming more fluid in their content consumption. Raghunath advised journalists to rethink traditional journalism and adopt a multi-modal approach with the help of AI, analytics, and transformers. 

Expanding her thought, she said, “From basic useful tasks to say, hey, today there are 10 reports that have been released, here are these 10 reports, can you identify a certain word that has been provided in all these reports and what are the five contexts? So a story idea, a research idea, it's unlocking your brain but making sure that you understand the context, right?

So I think whether you're a reporter, whether you're a publisher, whether from the data side, AI as a tool which incrementally makes you more productive as the individual, the manager of your organization, this is very, very important.”

Apps versus URLs

Apps or URLs, what should news publishers focus on remains the question of the hour as apps are easier to use, and URLs are easier to access and operate as they remain noble.

Shedding light on the debate of apps versus URLs, Raghunath said, “Apps, by their very nature, are a first-party data product. Ideally, they are suited for long-term substitution because users who download the app spend an average of six to seven minutes in the news segment, compared to four and a half minutes per session in OpenWare. In OpenWare, users consume about two to three pages per session, while on the app, it's 15 to 20 pages.

The average CPM on the web is around five cents per hour, but it tends to be half a dollar or more on the app. However, maintaining an app is resource-intensive, requiring time, effort, and money to ensure it performs well on both Android and iOS platforms. If the app's performance is not up to par, users will eventually uninstall it.

On the other hand, URLs are much easier to discover and involve less friction when finding a story. When someone shares a story or searches for something, it's easy to find via a URL. From a breaking news or knowledge perspective, URLs will always be relevant and continue to grow, especially with multi-modal discovery. However, apps serve as a significant brand voice and loyalty puller. Just as newspaper print was an index of loyalty 20 years ago, apps now represent absolute loyalty in the digital age.”

Summing up the session, Raghunath mentioned the possibilities for news publishers are immense if they focus on Indic language consumers and analytics to capture user behaviour.