It took 64 years for the revered Indian newspaper NaiDunia to reach a circulation of 500,000 – a figure that would make most North American publishers swoon.
That was two years ago. Since then, the paper’s circulation has soared a stunning 62.5 per cent to 800,000 copies a day, and the publication’s owner, NaiDunia Media Pvt. Ltd, says that’s just the start.
By 2016, the company aims to reach a readership of 15 million – nearly triple the circulations of the three biggest U.S. dailies, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, combined.
The market for newspapers is on fire in India, where household spending and government investment fuelled the second-fastest economic growth among advanced countries last year, behind only China. That growth has given rise to a new, more literate consumer class – and the payoff for print media has been huge. The country’s print industry, now worth about $4.5-billion U.S., grew by an estimated 10 per cent in each of the last three years.
The owner of NaiDunia is among several companies looking to take advantage of that remarkable growth. In 2008 it set up an office in Delhi and went national, with new local editions in several mid-size cities and a fat Sunday edition, including a glossy magazine, distributed across the “Hindi belt” states of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Haryana and Bihar.
Now the company is eyeing expansion into regional dailies. Editor-in-chief Alok Mehta rattles off 12 cities with populations under 10 million where the company’s “quality content and smart design” will lure new Hindi readers. But NaiDunia (“New World” in Hindi) will have plenty of competition. Mumbai-based industry analysts predict regional Hindi papers will drive growth of nine to 15 per cent in each of the coming years.
Advertisers are seizing on that growth, targeting rural areas and small cities in their efforts to sell everything from real estate to consumer durables. Many of these readers have new money in their pockets, but there are limited ways for advertisers to reach them. They generally don’t have televisions or use the Internet, and private radio is rare, said Smita Jha, who heads the media and entertainment consultancy with PricewaterhouseCoopers India.
Mobile-phone companies, for example, are placing targeted ads for their lowest-priced handsets in the pages of local-language, small-city dailies. While most of the traditional ad spend has been national – and focused on the elite, English-language dailies – a whole new cohort of local advertisers is developing to target the new consumers.
In India, print faces no immediate threat here from other media. Only seven per cent of Indians are regular users of the Internet. Cable TV news channels are ubiquitous, but the cost of a television, a cable connection and the electricity to run it (at about $1,000, all told) remains beyond the reach of a significant chunk of the market. Private radio stations have only recently been licensed – big newspaper companies are buying up many of the new licenses, identifying radio as a natural overlap with their existing infrastructure and brands.
Increased literacy is also playing a key role in the industry’s dramatic ascent. This year’s national census data shows an adult literacy level of 74 per cent, up nine per cent from the last census a decade ago. While much of that increase is attributed to literate young people who have been reached by an expanded public school system, the government is also doing extensive literacy outreach with rural adults.
