Exclusive: Cross-media focus, diversified funding at heart of IRS 2.0, says Vikram Sakhuja

New Delhi: The Indian Readership Survey (IRS), once the industry’s north star for tracking who reads what, has been off the radar since 2019. Advertisers and agencies had been craving a map in a media jungle where everyone claims to be the biggest. Its absence meant navigating media planning through fragmented data and assumptions. 

Now, the IRS is gearing up for a long-awaited revival and at the helm is Vikram Sakhuja, Group CEO, Madison Media. Sakhuja is the newly elected chairman of the Media Research Users Council India (MRUCI). With the steering wheel for the IRS in hands, Sakhuja is aiming to rebuild its authority, rewrite it for a digital-first world, and make it relevant in a market where cross-media measurement has become the holy grail. 

In an exclusive interaction with BestMediaInfo.com, Sakhuja confirmed that the IRS will not just be about counting readers, but stitching together consumption across print, digital, social, and television, and offering advertisers a baseline to measure fragmentation against. 

IRS 2.0

For decades, IRS was treated as the final word on print readership. Its absence since 2019 left a vacuum, just as digital consumption accelerated and multi-platform planning became the new normal. Advertisers now want a study that can anchor fragmented datasets in one establishment survey. Sakhuja is positioning the IRS for that role.

“This is going to be the definitive, cross-media survey. It will capture a point in time, gathering data on all mediums. Through the IRS, when it's finally released, you'll discover the penetration of every medium, from YouTube and online newspapers to social media, e-commerce, and beyond. All of that will be picked up, creating a comprehensive study,” he told BestMediaInfo.com. 

This shift is deliberate. The IRS has historically been anchored in print, often treated by advertisers as the single source of truth for readership. But the last six years have seen a tectonic shift. Online news editions, social media platforms, and video-on-demand services have rewritten consumption habits. Sakhuja admits that the IRS has to contemporise itself or risk irrelevance.

Sakhuja highlighted how the entire way in which the media environment looks at touchpoints has changed. Hence, the IRS will be piloted to gauge the ground before getting into the game full-fledgedly. 

“We want to understand a few things better, specifically the entire online digital space, like online newspaper readership and how reading patterns are changing. In the digital world, we often talk about monthly active users, weekly active users, and daily active users. We want to update our approach to align with how the media environment now looks at different media touch points. We're starting with a pilot, which we will then expand into a regular, full-blown survey” he explained. 

Funding and governance

The upcoming pilot, across metro cities and two states, is designed to test whether the IRS can capture this new reality. It will look not just at conventional print readership but also digital adoption, affluent gated communities, and regional penetration, making it a credible platform for measurement. 

But of course, credibility does not come cheap. 

Industry experts, in the past, have pointed at a wallet size of Rs 20-25 crore, primarily incurred by the publishers. Stunted support, monetarily, was highlighted as one of the core reasons that crippled the survey for more than half a decade. Sakhuja believes that the equation may be at the helm of changing. 

While publishers will still be the biggest patrons of the study, Sakhuja hinted that many big advertisers are “willing” to chip in. 

“Historically, publishers have shouldered the majority of the survey's funding. And while they will always be the biggest patrons, I'm confident we'll see many more interested parties. My informal conversations with heads of major companies indicate they are all talking about participating.

This is a survey for the entire industry. While funding has been historically skewed toward publishers and agencies, it's better for everyone that the costs get distributed among more stakeholders,” said Sakhuja. 

With money comes the question of control. Skeptics have long worried that publisher funding gives them outsized influence over the survey. Moreover, historically, the survey seems to have lost in a “Bermuda Triangle,” as pictured by BestMediaInfo.com, of publishers, advertisers, and agencies, where it struggled to please all sides. 

For Sakhuja, the IRS’s authority has never been in doubt. He insists that the very structure of the MRUCI is a guard rail to that. Central to the structure is the head of the technical committee who has typically not been a publisher, for the very reason of avoiding conflict. 

“We have a full board made up of publishers, broadcasters, advertisers, and agencies. The technical committee head has typically not been a publisher because we want to avoid conflict. Representation comes from all sides and we maintain high standards of controls and governance. I do not see a problem,” he assured. 

He added, “This is an institution which has been going on for decades. I do not think anybody has ever challenged the authority of the IRS as a number. I am hoping that soon we are going to be able to get something in front of people.” 

Pilot and pivot

According to Sakhuja, the immediate priority is to “just get the IRS going.” The choice of pilot markets remains under wraps. But the logic is clear. The study needs to capture diversity in readership and digital penetration, and ensure that the so-called “creamy layers”, affluent audiences behind gated communities, are represented. 

“You want to pick up creamy layers, digital readership, conventional print readership, and penetration. Once we get that right and people are happy, we can roll it out to a full study as well,” he said. 

When it was last published in 2019, the IRS was already vast in scope, covering every district cluster, urban and rural, across all languages. 

Sakhuja promises the new version will be equally comprehensive but with digital stitched in from the ground up. “It is a full all-India study. It goes very deep, across every region and every language. Obviously it goes down to all languages. But beyond that, it will also capture social media, online newspaper editions, and broader digital consumption. That is what makes it contemporary,” he said. 

The industry has waited six years for the IRS’s return. What it gets now will decide if the survey remains a print relic or evolves into the country’s most credible cross-media compass. Shared funding, digital-first sampling, and balanced governance are not side issues, they are the scaffolding that makes the cross-media promise believable.

If Sakhuja delivers on his promise, the survey will no longer be a print relic dusted off once in a while but a live cross-media compass that forces every medium to sit at the same table. The question now is whether the industry will put its money where its mouth is. 

Because if IRS 2.0 works, the excuses are over, and the numbers will finally do the talking.