Arnab-led NBF hails landing page action, the full circle of Republic’s TRP karma

New Delhi: In a striking display of irony, Republic TV Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami and his News Broadcasters Federation (NBF) have welcomed the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting’s (MIB) draft amendments aimed at curbing the use of “landing pages” in television ratings, the very mechanism that Republic itself exploited to establish its early dominance.

Landing pages have long been a contentious issue in Indian broadcasting. They are not advertisements or promos but pre-installed placements that automatically register viewership. 

Also read: Explained: I&B Ministry’s blueprint to strip landing-page viewership from TV ratings

When combined with multiple Logical Channel Numbers (LCNs), which allow a single channel to occupy several slots across the spectrum, broadcasters can manufacture inflated reach and distort competition.

For years, this digital sleight of hand skewed India’s TRP economy. Advertisers spent crores based on inflated impressions, smaller broadcasters were pushed to the margins, and genre leadership became as much about distribution muscle as about content quality. And nowhere was this phenomenon more dramatically personified than in Republic TV’s own rise.

The irony before the history

“The News Broadcasters Federation welcomes the decision of the MIB to seek a review of the ongoing measurement of landing pages and to seek responses to the proposal to ban the measurement of landing pages once and for all,” Goswami declared in a statement.

To those who followed the channel’s ascent closely, the remark carried the weight of déjà vu, almost like a magician applauding the audience for finally spotting the trick.

“Some channels have made the use of landing pages as a strategic tool to mislead the advertisers and most unfortunately, BARC has so far failed to put a stop on this,” he continued.

The irony was immediate. For Republic, the use of landing pages wasn’t just a “strategic tool,” it was the catapult that launched it to the top of the English news charts in 2017.

Alleged internal WhatsApp chats between Goswami and then-BARC CEO Partho Dasgupta, later unearthed during the Mumbai Police’s TRP scam investigation, paint a more intricate picture. 

They suggest the channel tracked competitor viewership data in real time, lobbied for adjustments, and actively coordinated landing page deployments across key markets. For someone known for demanding accountability with the now-iconic refrain “The nation wants to know,” Goswami appeared to know quite a lot about how the numbers were being shaped behind the scenes.

How Republic’s landing-page playbook rewrote TV history

The story of landing pages as a disruptive, and controversial, force in Indian news measurement began long before the current MIB draft. But Republic’s 2017 debut gave it a defining face.

When Republic TV launched in May that year, it stormed into the No. 1 spot in its very first week, dethroning Times Now, which had led the English news genre for over a decade. The industry was stunned.

How did a newcomer with no legacy network or paid subscriber base suddenly outrun the most established player in the space?

The answer, whispered through distribution corridors, was simple: landing pages and dual LCNs. Republic reportedly struck widespread carriage deals that placed its channel as the default option on several networks. In households where the set-top box automatically powered up to Republic, every ignition became a counted impression.

A forensic audit by Acquisory in 2020, commissioned during the broader BARC ratings crisis, would later validate much of what the industry had suspected. It found that Dasgupta, then BARC CEO, had tweaked the outlier policy in Republic’s favour. 

Certain weeks saw Republic’s viewership elevated, while Times Now’s legitimate impressions were reduced, despite full awareness of Republic’s multiple landing placements.

Landing pages, in short, were the invisible accelerator. They did not just amplify the Republic's reach; they helped script its mythology, the story of an insurgent channel “toppling” a media establishment.

From disruption to contradiction

Over the next few years, Republic oscillated between using and condemning the very tools that built its early success.

Publicly, the channel positioned itself as the victim of unfair practices, alleging that rivals like Times Now had begun using landing pages to claw back lost viewership. Republic’s team reportedly sent more than 50 complaint emails to BARC, accusing competitors of gaming the system.

Privately, however, the alleged Goswami–Dasgupta chats told a different story. They revealed detailed discussions about market-by-market placements, competitor movements, and internal TRP shifts. Republic wasn’t just a participant in the landing page race, it was often steering it.

In 2019, when CNN-News18 used aggressive landing placements to temporarily top the English news charts, Republic cried foul again. BARC responded by moderating landing-page data, underscoring just how potent, and how common, the practice had become.

But Republic’s creativity extended to Hindi as well. With Republic Bharat entering the fray in 2019, the same playbook was adapted for a larger, more competitive market. 

In August 2023, anticipating a possible freeze on news ratings, Republic Bharat reportedly secured secondary landing placements across 28 states, cleverly positioning itself immediately after the cable operator’s info channel, which most viewers encountered first.

This sly workaround allowed Republic Bharat to bypass some of BARC’s filters while maintaining a massive passive reach. The result? A two-rank leap that placed it at No. 3 nationally for the week, edging out India TV.

For broadcasters, it was “distribution optimisation.” For regulators, it looked a lot like manipulation.

The MIB’s new rules of engagement

The Ministry’s latest draft amendments attempt to correct these long-standing distortions. They propose to:

• Exclude landing page viewership from television ratings.

• Cap cross-holdings in audience measurement bodies to avoid conflicts of interest.

• Expand the national sample size from 80,000 to 120,000 households for greater statistical representation.

• Tighten registration norms for rating agencies, requiring periodic audits and disclosures.

Together, these measures represent the most sweeping overhaul of India’s audience measurement framework since BARC’s formation in 2015. The intent is clear, restore advertiser confidence, curb data manipulation, and dismantle the economics of inflated reach.

But in this renewed age of TRP transparency, Goswami’s cheerleading struck many as revisionist.

“NBF has been engaging with all stakeholders constructively and we believe that by ending landing pages measurement finally, this bad practice will end,” the federation said in its official statement.

Constructive, perhaps, but selective. NBF’s own claim of being the “first and only government-recognised industry body” had earlier ruffled feathers among veteran associations like the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (IBF) and the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), both of which had decades-long regulatory engagement.

The tone of the current statement, part moral victory, part policy endorsement, reflects that same mix of self-certification and opportunism. “We also hope that broadcasters who use this tool as an artificial measure to spike ratings stop doing so,” Goswami added.

Yet the historical record leaves little ambiguity about who pioneered that very tool in its most aggressive form.

Industry fatigue and advertiser fallout

The broader television industry has long grown weary of TRP theatrics. Channels like NDTV and Zee Media have, at various points, withdrawn from BARC ratings altogether, citing opaque processes and undue influence from dominant networks.

For advertisers, this unreliability translated into risk. If ratings could be manipulated through landing placements or dual feeds, media buying decisions, worth hundreds of crores annually, risked being based on illusion rather than audience behaviour.

The result was an erosion of trust. Many advertisers began supplementing BARC data with digital analytics, YouTube performance, and social media engagement, a tacit acknowledgment that the TV rating system had lost its monopoly on credibility.

The MIB’s move, then, is not just administrative; it is existential. It seeks to restore faith in a system that has, for years, been fighting ghosts of its own making.

A strange solidarity

“The NBF stands in solidarity with independent news broadcasters across the country on this issue,” Goswami’s statement concluded.

Solidarity is an admirable word, but context makes it complicated. Smaller broadcasters have long argued that Republic’s aggressive use of landing pages priced them out of distribution deals. Many regional players, with limited resources, were forced to choose between losing visibility or bleeding financially.

For them, solidarity arrived years too late.

Still, the optics of this moment are fascinating. Arnab Goswami, the face of high-decibel news television and the architect of India’s most consequential TRP disruption, now stands shoulder-to-shoulder with regulators calling for restraint.

The full circle

From 2017’s insurgent debut to 2025’s moral positioning, the Republic–landing page saga captures the duality of Indian news television: its innovation and its opportunism, its ambition and its amnesia.

The MIB’s draft amendments, while technical on paper, represent a long-overdue correction for an industry where perception often outran reality. They promise a cleaner, fairer, and more accountable ecosystem for both broadcasters and advertisers.

And yet, the irony remains the story.

Arnab Goswami’s applause for the landing page ban is, in essence, the final act of a long performance, one where the protagonist who built the stage now commends its dismantling. It’s not hypocrisy as much as evolution, but evolution dressed in the language of reform.

Landing pages may finally be ending. But their legacy, and the mythology they fuelled, will continue to haunt the airwaves.

Because in India’s television business, truth is rarely just a number on a ratings sheet. It’s also a narrative, and few have mastered that better than Arnab Goswami.