Warc, 14 August 2013
KOLKATA: Marketers could capitalise on increasing literacy
which has resulted in the circulation of India's newspapers spreading to
smaller towns and more rural areas.
Media groups have noted that newspaper penetration in the
countryside can be as low as 5%, against 70% in cities, but, as DD Purkayastha,
chief executive of ABP, told the Financial Times: "Those people are
getting literate and they have started reading newspapers."
Consequently, distribution is being widened and new
publications are appearing in local languages.
In the latter case, newspapers have sought to attract
readers through a focus on local affairs. "The strength of vernacular
dailies in India is the strength of the coverage given to districts, which is
not done by the English dailies," said Manas Ghosh, editor of the
Bengali-language edition of The Statesman, a Kolkata daily.
And these newspapers are regarded as being less at risk from
the growth of the internet than their English-language counterparts.
Newspapers have also benefited from an unexpected finding.
As the number of television channels grow so too do the number of newspaper
readers, in what PN Vasanti, director of research group CMS, has dubbed
"the appetiser effect".
"People who go and watch television more go back to
check facts in print. That's a very unusual phenomenon that doesn't happen
anywhere else in the world," she said.
Newspaper business models, however, are precarious, and
growing circulations may not be enough to offset a rise in the cost of
printing, given that cover prices are very low. Profits are overly reliant on
advertising income, although Purkayastha noted that advertising growth had been
"fairly handsome in the past decade."
It is forecast to continue to be healthy in the medium term,
with a report from KPMG and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and
Industry indicating that print advertising revenues forecast will grow at more
than 10% annually.
Data sourced from Financial Times; additional content by
Warc staff
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