How changing news consumption behaviour has impacted news platforms, publishers and advertisers

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The launch of Jio in 2012 had moved India from 150^th to first position globally in mobile broadband penetration. Along with bandwidth, Jio also supplied its customers with myriad Value-Added Services (VAS) catering to entertainment and information. The days that followed rapidly transformed the media consumption habits of Indians to digital first.

JioMags and JioNewspapers were Jio’s offerings that catered to print media. These apps provided aggregated e-versions of magazines and dailies, along with digital perquisites like text-to-speech read out, pinch-and-zoom, cloud synching of content, among others. Besides adding to customer delight, these products habituated users to anytime anywhere consumption, thereby initiating a digital revolution of print media.

For advertisers, this was a first-of-its-kind opportunity to augment their print ads with digital ad-ons like video-embeds and promotional links on which both click-through-rates (CTRs) and conversions could be tracked. For these statistics, brands were willing to pay higher ad rates in magazines and newspapers. The overall ecosystem of customers, platforms, publishers and advertisers was thereby benefited.

It was around this time that publishers of print media turned their focus to their websites and started investing in their digital operations. They joined the increasingly intense competition to grab users’ attention online and to build engagement across their websites and apps.

‘Real- Time’ Is A Good Time

In the meanwhile, instant news apps were catching on. Digital engagement on these apps was being shaped by their notification strategy. News notifications had to be real-time and relevant.

DailyHunt had recently been launched and was already gaining the first mover advantage as a news aggregator. Jio was also close behind in launching JioXpressNews (later to be named JioNews) – an aggregator platform backed by personalisation, localisation and Indic focus.

Whether it was legacy media houses or aggregator news apps, there was an overload of instantaneous news feeds being updated by the second. For the next few years, platforms faced the challenge of bringing structure, credibility and relevancy. The opportunity was in getting granular data on consumer interests. For instance, lifestyle as a broad interest area could be further bifurcated into home décor, parenting, food, travel and fashion.

Meanwhile, ads on publisher content were getting sharper and targeted. Also, the pie of rural consumers was rising and brands were customising ads to the sensibilities and cultural familiarities of Bharat. The principles of hyper-personalisation, localisation, regional focus and instant updates were ubiquitous and formative for the digital news business.

What’s Trending Is News

By 2020, news consumption through digital apps had increased, and newspaper readership had declined by 40 percent.  Due to the wide adoption of social media, traditional newsrooms, with their 24-hour news cycle, were losing their popularity.

Moreover, the definition of news was diluting – it was shifting from mainstream national news to trending hashtags and popular conversations on social media. According to a study of 2023, 88 percent of users consume news through social media sites.

Getting an engaging news feed, ability to debate and comment and getting peoples’ perspectives on issues are some of the main motivations for users to consume news from social media. However social media platforms can falter in delivering reliable and authentic news.

Factual news can be drowned by voices of influencers and celebrities that can often be more sensational and strident. News aggregator platforms, on the other hand, provide content quality checks, and are continuously evolving to remain relevant to their audiences.

To capture the shrinking attention span of users, news platforms are delivering short-text capsules in a customer friendly design. The credibility of data is preserved by references to verified sources of news. JioNews has not only adopted this trend via its recently launched ‘Summary’ feature, but also maintains its competitive advantage by doing so in 12 Indian languages.

Largely thriving on ad revenue, contemporary news platforms create a unique opportunity for brands to engage with their audiences through non-intrusive and platform-native ad formats such as advertorials and branded content. Digital advertising is evolving in parallel by getting extremely targeted, localised and sharp.

News And Views

Video news is gaining popularity both on social media and news platforms. According to a report of 2023, 93 percent of news consumption happens on YouTube, which exceeds the consumption from social media. Video content entails both Professionally Generated Content (PGC) from media houses and publishers, and User Generated Content (UGC) from local reporters, celebrities, influencers and ordinary people.

PGC and UGC news content are being created in engaging formats that keep up with the rampant popularity of short-form video platforms. It is increasingly challenging for advertisers to keep pace with this trend and make their point with sharper shorter ads before a user has swiped them away. Advertisers are investing in branded content and shareable ad formats that will benefit the brands and the burgeoning creator community.

In conclusion, the news consumption pattern of users has evolved over the years from offline to online, from long-form to short-form, from 24-hour newsroom to instant alerts, from text-based to video centric. Each phase has catalysed the advancement of the entire consumer, publisher, advertiser ecosystem.

As generative AI becomes prevalent, it brings the possibility of on-demand personalised news. If the technology is adopted, the near future of news will depend on overcoming the challenges of misinformation and upholding source credibility which will always remain top priorities among news consumers.

(Disclaimer: Moneycontrol is a part of the Network18 group. Network18 is controlled by Independent Media Trust, of which Reliance Industries is the sole beneficiary.)

Taskeen Nadkar is Assistant Vice President, Jio Media Limited. Views are personal, and do not represent the stand of this publication