 Hi everybody. Thanks for coming in. So in just to kind of structure this entire piece, I thought a good way to do it probably would be I have a bunch of questions around what I could I could see around the new spectrum. I'm happy to put that out and feel free to jump in and answer those. So if anybody has an answer to it and if somebody else has a counterpoint to it or whatever, please feel free to do this thing. So I'm not literally going order wise or targeting questions to individual people. It's more keeping it open on the forum. So feel free to jump in when you have a point of view on this. So yeah, I mean, what a time to come in and this is last two months, I think instead of seeing each other face to face. I mean, last time I met Wignesh was another panel where we were sitting next to each other and now it's sitting across screens and having this discussion. Things have drastically changed, right? So I wanted to and I've been in a situation where because we are advertising agency and we handle a bunch of brands. I've seen the entire I've been privy to the larger spectrum of the digital ecosystem how it's been affected by COVID, right? So there are brands which have a digital brand that has gone to almost ground zero where there is no work happening, say something like a make my trip, etc. To there is something like a Netflix, which has seen a super high uptake. So in that bandwagon of things, if I have to put news media here at this point, or regional news, where between a make my trip and a Netflix, where do you see that where do you see this fitting in the impact that COVID's had on news media? So, you know, I want to kick it off with a slightly broader perspective at a national level and also talk a little bit about regional. You know, I would actually say on a relative basis and also in terms of the just the mass of audience, news is probably even higher than Netflix. And I'll tell you the reason why, you know, one is everyone in this country is talking to a destination to find out what the latest updates, how things are changing, what are the new rules, how the ground realities are changing at the country level, at the state level, at their local levels, what is happening in across the world, what kind of economy, and in general, there has been a slew of news items beyond COVID also across the globe, as we've all seen. So I think that's a natural environment for pushing the news consumption significantly higher. I think what has happened is especially in context to digital, the distribution chains or the circulation chains of the traditional media platforms like the print or radio, for example, they've been interrupted, they've been sort of stalled in most part of the country. And hence the primary source of information, which used to be by default, print in a large part of the country, that has migrated. You know, and the third part is really about the whole interactiveness. People are scared, people are anxious, and then they need forums that where they are able to connect, where they are able to get some advisory advice, questions, data, which helps them take decisions and all of that. So all these three combined have actually rocketed the audience growth across the news networks. In our case, for example, we've grown almost 50, 60% month on month on most of our sites, in some cases it's even higher. And I think that's my perspective and that's how we see it at least across the army. Has everybody here seen an uptick in users entirely overall? Yeah, so that's for sure. And I think one of the things I'd just like to add to what Puneet was saying, one is that yes, print was interrupted for a brief period, probably two to three weeks due to, you know, again, the fake news which was going around that, you know, paper carries the virus and all that stuff. It's a very unfortunate situation. I used to keep asking everybody, is paper carries the virus and how are you still dealing with cash? How are you still paying cash and getting cash? I mean, it makes no sense. I mean, when it's convenient for us, paper doesn't carry it, but it's not convenient for us, it carries it. So we used to argue with the RWAs in the works. But the good news is that I think print has come back and print has also shown that yes, we were as a magazine media player, we were especially afraid that, you know, is the habit getting diluted or is the habit getting skipped. But I'm happy to say that we were away out of print for three weeks. And once we came back, we put out a questionnaire and all that in our magazine, in our website and all that. We got the feedback saying that we are waiting for you guys to come back. And we actually saw it, even though shops were not open, people were willing to come to the morning points and pick up their copies. And even though the papers were not being allowed, newspapers and magazines were not being allowed to be distributed in the residential welfare association, because thanks to their RWAs, people are coming out and picking it up. So that was an amazing re-information that print is at least, it is still relevant in the minds of people and that's one piece of good news that I want to share. The second is just like for you to say, both web as well as especially we use this opportunity to get more people moving on to the app. So we've had 300% uptick on our app and that's keeping on going up. So what we've done is typically we've always been behind the paywall for the longest time, magazine content has been behind the paywall. But we said, if you download the app for a month, you'll get the magazines for free. So what's happened is that people have come onto the app, even from the site, they've come onto the app. And after a month, we're starting to see subscriptions getting converted. So that is the funnel approach has really worked good for us. And I think that that says a lot. The third is engagement between the website and the app. The engagement levels on the app is 3x that of the website. And we've seen that we've got quizzes and games and fun things that we've started putting out there, which people are responding to very positively. We literally are users at about 2,000 bucks a day is what they make when they answer some of these quizzes. The kind of response that we are getting, tens of thousands of our users responding to quizzes three times a day. I think that is something that we have understood. And those quizzes are actually based on the current news and whatever's happening, including fake news, which we put out there saying that this is fake news. This is the fact. And then we run a quiz about fake news and they kind of support it. It's been quite an extraordinary experience. We've seen also that our user base has increased tremendously. What we've seen is, yes, COVID news did do well. Everyone wanted to know what's happening around them. But local happenings of things around them, that did very well. We had the reporter chain cover local NGOs. People needed a platform to donate and they needed authentic houses to donate. There were many who felt that this is the time to donate. And we were able to bring that platform to people where we were able to authenticate local, albeit small donation camps, but the authentic ones that we could put out there and help the donations go through. So that stage that we put out there did very well. And also, of course, it is a scary situation. But we kept a lot of things light and positive and that content did very well. And I think even now we see the trend that people do want to know nice things in life. They want to read about the nicer things, the funnier things. So the lighter way has been doing well and it's continuing to do well. Yeah, from Mahatma on the side, Caroline's special different story to tell. So basically, our newspaper circulation was never affected. Because the government made it clear that newspapers will be part of essential commodities and it has to be circulated and delivered. So it was pretty much helpful though. Now, coming to the second point, of course, like all the software publishers, I think, definitely had an update of around 30 to 35% of the traffic in this few months. Of course, COVID was definitely, you know, most forward view. And what we tried to do is that it tried to engage audience using our offline online mix. So like Srinivasan was pointing out, we also did something which can engage both friend users and online users, something like MQs what we call. So basically, the Qs will be basically basically on the night time, but the question will be based on what is printed on the TV in the morning. So basically, it actually helped us not to engage both the spectrum of audience and what the update we are seeing on the online side, we made sure that it is getting converted to a regular user. So we are very friendly, still engaged to something. So I think everybody covered it pretty clearly, but one of the things that we notice is obviously, you know, like all the other websites, we also saw a spike in our traffic, and especially for the content related to the pandemic and stuff like that. See from a digital perspective, what you should understand is a bulk of the traffic goes into content which is created from an entertainment perspective, from sports perspective, crime and stuff like that. So none of that was actually there for the last two months, and yet the traffic was still high. I do agree with Divya that doing a lot of hyper-local stories, especially from the news-mitted perspective, and since we cover the new space in English, we did see a lot of spikes. And after like one month of the pandemic, we also started bringing out a lot of positive stories because we've got a little bit fed up. I mean, how much of COVID-related content can you actually read over the month? There is, right now, I could obviously safely say that there has been an overdose of coverage on the pandemic. And if you want your traffic to spike up again, then you're looking at some celebrity getting COVID or something like that. So that's something that we actually missed out from a news perspective. This is quite interesting to hear this, right? Because I, as a user, for example, I'm also, I'm South Indian, but I'm in Bombay. And I've never actually gone around looking for regional use till this came through. And now, because I hear more about what Kerala is doing, so I want to read more about it than just what Times of India gives me in like one article in page six, right? I want to know more than that. And that's when you end up. So I did, I did start exploring this actively. And that's, so I would qualify in that new user category. I want to understand why you might, you guys must have called data out of this to understand where what kind of new users have come in and what is the habits. You think this is going to become a habit going forward? Like right now, what people are doing in terms of wanting to know regional stuff, you think going forward once things quote unquote normalize as they call it. Will this still be a thing for people outside of the region to come back, say somebody living in Dubai, wanting to know about Kerala, somebody living in America, trying to understand what's happening in Hyderabad or local this thing. Do you see that uptick continuing or is this a one off fact? Rohit, I have a slightly contrarian view to this. In fact, we have always found that hyper local content has been the driver of views, especially from those who have moved away from that hyper locality. Like we have our reporters across our 32 districts in Kabanadu and we have found that invariably the stories that they file about what's happening in the vicinity of their town in respect of either some panchayats or some temple festival or some clashes or whatever it may be. Generally, it affects the people who moved from there to Chennai in search of jobs or to the rest of India or to the rest of the world. So we've always found this affinity for wanting to get back to their local news as something of a driver. It may not apply so much to those who are reading it in English as much as it would be to those who are reading it still in their local language. So I think local newspapers and magazines typically have always thrived on this. In fact, we have done the reverse of that. We have used this opportunity for pandemic for us. User-generated content is always an important link but you be used this pandemic to talk about those who are separated from their towns or their villages, what they remembered about their towns, what they remembered about their villages or their family or their time back. So they started publishing those stories. They started sending us those stories and we started publishing them and those started gaining a lot of traction in the local. So I think it's a bit of a two-way situation and I think it has always worked for us. Anybody else has a point? I speak only from a regional publication perspective and not from a pan-India perspective. I think, see, back in the days, the digital, I mean not back in the days, just two months back, I would say that websites wanted to obviously increase their traffic, see how many users they could increase month on month and stuff like that. I think what we've realized in the last two months is, how do I engage my audience a lot more? Even if my audience is just a million, how do I make sure that I keep them engaged so that they come back and return? And like what Srinivas has said is, yes, a lot of people who have been away from, you know, the South part of, at least for us, at least from South India, I do see a lot of traffic coming in from there just to understand what exactly is happening from a local perspective. I think at some point they are still connected to their roots and Srinivas, not to take it away from you. I see a lot of people who can speak in Tamil and Kannada but they can't read it, so that's where we come in. Absolutely, yeah. But I do agree that, you know, a lot of hyperloping content, especially in the vernacular languages, is probably the way forward in terms of connecting them, you know, those people who are actually living outside as well. Yeah. Well, you should be, you should be syndicating some content from us for that. Anybody else has a point of view or do we move forward? Yeah, there's one small point. So basically, talking about Kerala prospecting, we have some inherent advantages. So, it is basically one of the literacy and second one was the highest international education, not just next to Delhi and Sia. And also, we have been traditionally people who have actually gone out and worked all day. So, within India and outside India, we always had a good profit of about 212 crore rupees in the stocking. So, the hyperlokal, like earlier somebody pointed out, is very much an event than it's not a COVID or post COVID scenario. It was always the, because you can gather international news from a lot of sources from your national news from a lot of sources. But what is happening in India all the time to come from? It's not covered in anywhere. So, that's what the strength of a regional local player who's well-entrant for the state news network that springers across the state, which can cover news, which is very, very hyperlokal. So, that scenario already is not something created by COVID according to me. So, then you know what, I'll just mold my question out saying, this uptake of users you've seen, do you have data or do you know where, who are these new users who come in then? If it's not specifically somebody, you can say that, yes, people always wanted to consume hyperlokal news. This whole uptake that you've seen, why is this uptake suddenly been there? Because I understand from an OTT perspective, the uptake has happened because everybody's sleeping at home and they have nothing else to consume. So, they're looking for more content to consume. So, is this uptake purely from the need to consume news that new people are coming to? Do we have any power of data that tells you what are the kind of people who you added suddenly, etc? Yeah. So, the point here is definitely we have, we can track off further traffic is coming from a particular view point of view. So, what you have generally seen is these last two months, this is something that's happened globally. So, it is not something which is very local or certain states or something like that. So, what has happened is that then people work outside of your home state and they want to know what is actually happening back at your place, what is happening here and here once. So, this traffic definitely goes up. So, they're more anxious. But second thing is basically, in India, there are specific cities which I don't want to name, but first, newspaper, distribution, how was small and what affected. So, where do we catch up the news on? Definitely, that would be online. Right? So, this traffic definitely comes from the incremental. Whether this is a statement, that's a strategy or implement to make sure that this audience just come, anybody who is coming new, how can you make them engage and stick on to with online follow. But that's a big challenge. Like, it is already coming back in a big way. So, no doubt. I think from a data perspective, I think it's very difficult to pinpoint and say where the new user is coming from. But I can very safely say that the medium through which the new traffic came onto our website at least was through WhatsApp. I think there was a lot of stories, local stories which were being shared. See, when we, at least in the last two months, we started focusing on taking inputs from our readers and figuring out what kind of content we should be putting on. One of the pieces which actually went viral, at least from a Bangalore perspective, and I'm talking only urban pockets, was we did an article on the resident welfare associations, the kind of restriction because people wanted to know, is my maid allowed to come in? Is my house self allowed to come in? Are visitors allowed to come into my apartment? So, we saw that not many people were writing on those kinds of situations. Can I travel from Kerala to Bangalore? If I don't have an emergency, but my father or my parents are in Bangalore, but I need to go and visit them. So, what happened? So, we started putting out a lot of informative content like that and I'm 100% sure that the medium through which it was consumed is WhatsApp because you're powering it to every single person. We obviously got feedback from resident welfare associations, how our articles were popular on their WhatsApp groups and stuff like that. See, whether they stick onto it like what Rohit had asked is something that I can't say right now until we continuously keep writing content on the resident welfare association which is obviously not possible. That is something that we'll have to wait and see. So, just from a slightly broader perspective, see look, for all our digital news publishers, all of us, direct traffic over a period of time has started to become a much smaller chunk. Large part of traffic is reference, it's lateral. Whether it comes from WhatsApp, social search, which is the biggest chunk. You know, and I think there is a general momentum on both sides in terms of your direct traffic growing and that's the salience of the brand and your ability to cover local staff and that comfort with the brand, whether it's a print brand, television brand and then the association becomes easy. So typically, you will see a 30 to 40 percent spike in your direct traffic and that's also important because in an era where there is all sorts of news and fake data and everything flying around, it's important to go to news France where people have implicit trust in. So I think that's where the direct traffic. But a large part of the other traffic, which is coming laterally, is the general momentum. I mean, if you do like a quick Google site guess or a list of top search terms and all that is very, very clear where the general audience or kind of stuff are looking at and then they hop on to the respective site. That really is the one which is opening up a much wider set of audience. So I'll give you an example. My 18 year old son, for example, would not do too much search beyond, let's say, English Premier League or NBA or anything. Those guys have evolved into a slightly more apt kind of environment. But he would now these days do search on, okay, what's happening on COVID or how the vaccine development started going on, what companies are doing, what and all those kind of things. Not necessarily only data, but that's a very different set. And then they would come to one of our news sites and that's what validates the opening up and the access to this new consumer, which in a typical scenario, would you expect them to come and type up your URL with it? Probably not, a lot less. Then I think this follows the big question that on half of mine's right, which is the question on revenue. So which is, is this whole uptick in users that we're seeing across the board, does that translate in an uptick in revenue at all? And if not, now do you see this eventually becoming an uptick in revenue? What is your view on monetizing this entire piece? Okay, sorry. So I'm a firm believer in reader revenues. And I have been for 15 years now. We went pay in 2005. And we've been free name, of course. Some of it we have in front of the paywall and some of it behind the paywall. I think the advertiser driven revenue is going through a lot of change. And I don't think after COVID, post COVID, I think that change is going to be pretty permanent. It's going to leave a scar on most of us. Because I think end of the day, if you look at the way YouTube has searched during this time, we are a very big player on YouTube too. So for us again, views have gone through the roof. But the CPMs have just hit the floor, if not lower. And the net deliverable or net revenue that we can earn from YouTube has is barely 10% of what we used to earn a couple of months back. So it's actually gone nowhere. So I think there is a glut in inventory. And I think, I don't know if all the panelists are going to agree with this, but I think that inventory glut is not going to go away anytime in the near future. I think all of us, thanks to the positive reinforcement that we are all putting on engagement on trying to keep our traffic within our app or our site as the case may be and giving more and more content perspectives to the users. So for example, we have selectively picked up from our archives. So when there is no entertainment news or not significant crime news and not much of political news to go by during these two months, what did we do? We dug up our archives. We took content which is very, very relatable and very adaptable to the requirements of today. And then we kept our engagement going based on that. So we found new ways of doing this. So we are expanding the pie. But for the advertisers to meet that expanded pie, it's going to take a while. So I firmly believe that, for example, in the next couple of months, we are thinking of going completely behind the paper. We believe that reader revenues has to be the way forward because it may be difficult. It may be an impossibility of performance. It may be actually something which seems like a logo. But if we don't do it now, I would say that we've lost a historic opportunity because we've got users, we've got them engaged and we've actually kind of understood how to consistently keep them engaged even at a time when news cycle is relatively down. So how do we monetize out of this? And the advertiser should be the icing on the cake, not the bread and butter itself. So if we're going to flip that equation, I think we'll manage whether we're able to do that, you will know in some time. Yeah, I agree. It's time. This is the right time to go behind paywalls and subscriptions. Like Mr. Rimasan said, yes, we have proved that we are able to engage our users and get so many more. So we've actually in our regional space, we haven't gone behind the wall. We haven't had subscriptions, not even paid subscriptions, haven't even had the ink subscription. But now we're in talks with our competitors so that we could all come into consensus and come up with the pricing plan so all of us can go behind the paywall simultaneously, especially for the e-paper. So I totally agree that the revenues have to come from the readers now. The spends are going to be very, very small and smart and targeted. That gives web the upper hand over paper and TV where we're able to give targeted ads, but still the spends are going to be quite small is what I feel. That being said, we are seeing an upswing after the fall already. A lot of clients have expressed their interest to advertise because they want people to know that they are back in business and they are ready to start their online businesses. Many clients have moved from storefronts to online businesses and they want to advertise their businesses now. And we're also in talks with some of the clients who have moved this way to digital to provide them IT services to put up their websites, the e-commerce websites quickly. So we're trying newer revenue models with existing clients and that's all in the works now. So it's going to be a different kind of revenue model for all of us and we have to explore some more options and experiment with some more things before we see anything like before. Yeah, so on the monetization, I come with a bit of ad network background. So this is something that I understand pretty well. So you talk about any large platform, it's not pretty much war garden. What is actually going inside? Nobody knows. What the dashboard is throwing is what you're talking about. So that has been the way it has been. Now how we can try to address this or reduce the damage is, we always as an organization believe direct selling is something which gives us the best yield. I think everybody will agree because the kind of yields I get from direct sales deeds are at least five, six times more than what I get from any platform or anything. Now, yes, last two days, if you look at the summary was watched how the ECPMs were formatting because the profit was going to the road. So many users are getting generated but only players who are standing at that time are basically people who are something to do with health and wellness online, online entertainment, online education, you know, hyperlocal essential supplies and things like that. Pretty much others were very cautious, you know, almost not spending. So this this is almost seen everywhere, not only individuals or publishers, even even large platforms, there is some reports, quarterly results just come out, which shows it minimally, like 4-5 percentage, but they always do quarter on quarter. First time they go by minus 4-5 percentage in short maybe 2-3 years, I have not seen any big growth happening in any platform. But so that trend situation is always definitely there are two things that are going to evolve so one is basically definitely you are going to quantize your readers data, then your first party data which you gather all of that, that is going to be very, very crucial in the industry. Because that has implication on how hope targeted you know to do the ads with or the commission, especially the cookie forces also changing maybe in a little time. So basically developing this you know reader data plus prospective data is going to be very, very crucial for growth and survival of all the publishers. That's my point. You know, I think there's other, there's two more aspects, you know, one is the fact that yes there is an audience search, but it's actually on back of largely what we call the negative views, you know, which is not the best environment for most advertisers to be even looking at favor. You know, just from a traditional brand space or banners and all of those traditional forms of advertising. And hence, you know, one of the interesting way to leverage this audience or whatever you're able to retain out of it on platform is how you're able to give custom, custom solution and engaged, a lot more entrenched advertising opportunity to users or create tools within your own network which are, you know, which are specialized. So for example, stuff like creating a series around India positive. So as you come out of it, you know, already looking ahead how future of work will change, how things will evolve from the traditional offices to people working remotely, getting experts to come and talk about that. So, you know, the fact that you created a platform with this massive audience, if you're able to enable a lot of these conversations, then the brands become interested. But as Mr. Srinivasan said, you know, yes, it will be a while before they come back to the levels that we've been used to in terms of brand because the larger macroeconomic environment is such that, you know, everyone's everyone's feeling the stress on the consumer side. You know, there is there are pay guards, there is lots of jobs, there are general fear psychosis to try and save. The leverage lifestyle is a lot more prevalent than it was, let's say 10-15 years of war when our parents were working and sort of doing jobs and all that. So I think all of those things have will take, you know, that entire confidence will take a little bit of time to come back and on back of that, you know, hopefully the advertising, which typically we say is the first to go and last to come back and hopefully some of that will change and see the moment. Yeah, it's great that you guys actually touched upon this because this was my second point, right, where the other point that I wanted to speak about was paywall. And what was interesting, what you brought up to Srinivasan about paywall and what is really interesting, what you brought up, Divya, as well, is that it's something that you guys are talking with your competition as well. So it's almost like, it's not like I can go under a paywall without my competition being because maybe I will lose my, so it has to be a collective effort of sorts. And that's an interesting take on this. Also keeping, I'm just trying to understand, going out of the paywall has been a key question across the board. And I'm sure because of COVID, et cetera, we're saying that we could look at an accelerated path to it. The other side, which Puneet also touched upon is revenues in terms of even from a people perspective, right? There have been job cuts, there have been salary cuts. Suddenly, if I have to now pay for what I was accessing earlier for free or anything, how do you think user behavior would deal with something like that? And do you also see various methods? Are you going to form a different revenue model in terms of is it a full subscription model or can you pay per article? Have you guys thought of anything of that sorts as well on this front? Because I mean, if I've always got something for free and suddenly, today when my incoming revenue is low and if you ask me to open my purses, it does the question does pose in my head, right? So the way we have done it is you can literally on our site and on our app, you can buy a single magazine issue and you can pay as low as 15 rupees for that. And you can go right up to 12999 for a lifetime subscription. And you've got everything in between, right? And you've got you've got ebooks, you've got your trial subscription packs, you've got your monthly subscription packs, you've got your annual packs. There are actually a whole range of things. And so the way we do it is that not just that we offer so many options. We have, as Bobby was mentioning, data as important as data and analytics is important for the advertiser. That data is exactly what tells us what is the propensity for a potential subscriber for a potential customer of ours to pay. So we have what is called a propensity to pay algorithm, which tells us based on their visits to our site, based on their consumption pattern, it tells us what package to be able to tailor make for which user and to deliver with what kind of messaging and what offer at what point of time, right? And that is a, it's a kind of an AI engine, which keeps understanding better based on making a postulate, making somebody actually trying to understand what is the potential for somebody to make a purchase and then finding out whether that actually goes through and then, you know, the entire whole model. So we have inside sales team, we have, you know, our email database, we've got an SMS database, we're able to, you know, app engagement through and through Facebook and other places, we are actually able to tap the user, depending on their propensity to pay. And we are improving on that algorithm, you know, just every day. So I probably haven't answered the question that you say, do you ask about, you know, at a time like this, you know, do you expect your user to pay? So I would, I would say data would give us a much better picture. So for example, data tells us if this user has used, has, has gone to an e-commerce website within the last two months, right? So, so it will, it will give us a little bit of his or her ability to open up the wallet to us. Yeah. So these are, we have multiple factors that actually help us understand whether this user is capable of paying. Also, I think, you know, one of the key aspects in any subscription business is the kind of value you are able to give to the user, you know, and he's paying for a certain service, what does he get? You know, and he gets, what does he get when he comes in? And what are the likely improvements over a period of time so that you are able to ensure that he stays with you, you know, get making that first sale is a lot easier than detaining users for the longer term. And there I feel, you know, if you're able to come up with a value proposition, which is aligned with what the user sort of needs are and what the general sort of audience is looking at and constantly keep on improving it, it helps quite a lot, you know, maybe, and I'll just give a quick example of money control, which I was talking deeply about before we started, you know, we started money control about a year back and, you know, in, in Bake Off, a fair bit of pushback, you know, why are we doing it, what is the value proposition, is it only adds three, you know, that's not value enough and all of these things. Cut to that to a stage where we now over 250,000 paying subscribers and, you know, and we added between, as I said, 21st April, which was the first anniversary. In about 20 days period, we added 50,000 new subscribers. And so yes, we started with an ad-free product. And then over a period of time, we got differentiated content, insights, a lot of data, a lot of analysis and all of that, and that's something which has constantly, you know, constantly been evolved. On an average, there are two or three product upgrades or new features that we are launching every month. And under the circumstances where personal finance savings, money has become a very, very important part of the consideration set and the thought process of every individual, it's sort of seen that traction where more and more people are trying to access it, getting the subscription. The other thing that, you know, if you're able to give the value when we started, we had a one month subscription quarterly, half yearly, one year subscription. And we sort of over a period of time, what we did was we've phased out two or three years. So for example, we've done away with a couple of sets and because data showed us, as Mr. Srinivasan pointed out, studying that data and data showed us that even in the initial terms, almost 45, 47% of our users were on annual plans. So clearly that was an indicator for us to make the pricing decisions and sort of run promotions and offers from that point. So I speak entirely from a general news website perspective. We've obviously been debating whether we should go behind a paywall or we shouldn't go behind a paywall. Personally, you know, I feel that, you know, the legacy media players, when they started their digital versions, they gave everything for free. And so the consumer mentality is such that, you know, why should we pay for general news? So changing the perception is going to take a lot longer than what, you know, I would expect. So from the news minute perspective, we would probably never go behind a paywall, especially when it comes to our content. But having said that, we did launch a membership model of sorts. Basically, this is an annual membership where the person who's a very engaged reader of TNM who likes us for what we do and likes our content and has been interacting with us, you know, on a regular basis. So we are basically adding a lot more products which are individualized to the person who's actually going to become a member. So none of the content is going to go behind the paywall, but we're exploring with something like this so that, you know, we can keep the user engaged, obviously make, you know, we're also looking at lifetime membership models and stuff like that, wherein the user gets a lot more different kind of access. None of the content, like I said, would be behind the paywall, but this would be more on a relationship building, you know, basis from TNM and the reader as well. And like what Puneet said that, see, you have to have some kind of specialized content. I've always argued this that, you know, if you're going to be in the general new space, if you're debunking a lot of fake news and then that's going to be behind the paywall, then what are you trying to, who are you trying to help? Like you tapped on the elephant in the room, the fake news spectrum, right? Yeah. Which I think it's, it's, it's impacted. Just before we started this panel, we were having a discussion with the Srinivasan Central Board that fake news is impacting a news publication itself because it's fake news about how it would send through the paper and then suddenly just tell me, try to understand from how has technology in general come and change the game you're in, in the news spectrum for you guys as just to move away from the current topic on this is how, how important a role is tech playing and now going forward with more and more people reading this online, what, what is the role that you see tech playing? So one is, is, do you see tech helping solve for the fake news problem that exists? Is that something that, is it, are you able to understand, gather the kind of data and then craft news specifically to people? Because I was talking to somebody and they mentioned that, hey, we craft news basis, the audience that reads that. So if you read a certain kind of news, I give you only that. For me, that was a problem because then I end up becoming a frog in the well, right? It's almost like an echo chamber like you're reading. So how is, and that really helps as an advertiser, but from a news publication, how is tech helping, tech data, all of these keywords that are thrown out, helping you guys? Yeah, I think personalized news or individualized news is one of the most abused words, you know, in this, in this entire process. The way, I think we should look at it and the way, at least we have been attempting to look at it, it's pretty much like how Amazon does their recommendations to you. So when you just go for the first time, you know, log into Amazon and you browse for a book. You don't get only the same titles or, you know, titles in the same genre. They look at people who bought this also bought this, right? So that's the starting point. And then that algorithm keeps working on your choices and keeps trying to expand those choices for you based on your interest, but also based on the kind of persona that you hold within that community. I think that is the approach we are taking for personalization of the news feed. We are working on a model by which we believe at some point of time, we should be able to get to n is equal to one, which basically means like Alibaba says, every customer has a different website, you know, for Alibaba. I don't think we'll ever get there, but I'm saying if at all we could reach for that. It would be only based on tech and our ability to garner tech and create enough diversity, but give a relatively personalized news feed to every one of our customers. Just to give you a small example, while we do not want data to make us like Roldal's the great giant, you know, grammatizer, right? We don't want to put words and get a story out of it. That's not what we're looking for from tech. But what we are looking for from tech is at what time of the day to a certain demographic of an audience, consume a certain type of content and therefore, how can we encourage our newsrooms to develop and present such kind of content at such points of time? This is already happening and I won't say this is driving our consumption or engagement, but it is certainly enhancing. Right? So tech helps in multiple ways. I think tech must be used as an enabler. Tech cannot be the driver. We do not believe that tech is going to drive our news cycle, but tech can enable us to get to the right customers with the right kind of content at the right time. VVDLs have a build on this? See, the question that you asked in the email was specifically with artificial intelligence. If it's artificial intelligence that I'd like to say no. Obviously, every website aims to, you know, to make sure that, you know, if you're reading a particular piece of content, you try to feed in a lot more. You know, about two or three years back, we did a small exercise where I think it was during the times of Jaylalitha who was not well. There was a lot of Jaylalitha content on every single website. So deliberately, we have an infinite scroll platform. So when you read an article, the next article, you know, gets pulled out and that is based on what your interests are. So just to tweak it a bit, we put an entertainment copy. Okay. And we realize the amount of the completion rate for that entertainment copy was a lot higher. So it's not necessarily always that you have to feed content which, you know, the people are supposed to read. As an editor, you know, we should obviously be able to have the freedom to say that some content has to be, you know, read. See, from a social media perspective, I've seen a lot of the good longer ground reported pieces that we do being shared on Facebook and Twitter and, you know, with the nice status. If I look at my analytics, a thousand people who have read that story, you take the same thing, flip it aside and say that Deepika Patkone did something. It would not be shared on social media, but I'll give you a guarantee that I would have about a lack of people who actually read that. So that's where the mentality of a reader is. So, you know, how you try to define and use artificial intelligence or technology. So that's one side of it. The other thing is, you know, we are trying to actually innovate from a client perspective, you know, how do we increase our business and revenue through technology. So we're right now focusing on segmented advertising, right? We feel that, you know, after the pandemic, I mean, the lockdown is now opened up. We see a lot of local businesses who want to advertise, who have some kind of money, but obviously they cannot reach out to the newspapers and stuff like that. So they are going to obviously come to the digital platforms. It doesn't make any sense for me to advertise those brands to a Pan India audience. We have started looking at segmenting and saying that if it's Chennai, why can't we just advertise only to an audience in Chennai? So that, you know, there is a lot of return of investment for the brand itself. And the clients are a lot more happy to at least shell out some kind of money because they're saying that it's not wasted inventory like anywhere else where I just put it somewhere for eyeballs. Rather than that, I'm actually able to get some engagement in the area or locality that I'm actually situated in. So obviously, these are the tech enhancements that we are actually doing at our end. But from readership, I mean, from creating content, like what Srinivas said, you cannot use technology to debunk fake news. Because in a very polarized environment like what we are in right now, you can get 10 different articles debunking it, you can get 10 different articles actually justifying it. So I think from a technology perspective, it will never work out. Yeah, I have a small point to make here. So I just want to quote an example. There are a couple of data on the news that Microsoft has done having a few news rooms within the Amazon.com portal. I don't know if anyone of you has read this couple of days back. So what is happening here is that when you are in large horizontal websites, there are tons of content coming in, there's a bit of personalization always. I'm not talking about over personalization, but a little bit of personalization. Now, it will never match up with the curated content of these editors and just to be a bit of a winner. Why? Because each news actually has put up a certain kind of emotion behind, right? When you put up a news, there is happiness, there is anguish, there is despair, there is a kind of emotion. When people really do also, they have the same kind of emotions. So that cannot be done by any any machine. So obviously the curated content done by humans is going to stay, especially the case of generic news and kind of stuff. But what is this pre-section is where you have definite information, definite results, for example, sports. In sports, what matters is we know who has won, what is the score, you know definite answers, right? This kind of things automation will come, but generic news is very, very difficult. I wish we could go on, sorry, you are saying something. I think we can be used to gather data for your story, but not to write your story. No, no. I wish we could go on and ask further questions. I think it's 430 and we are close. Simran, can you help us? Are there any other questions from our viewers, etc. that you want to throw out or should we wrap this session here? Because it's already 430 and I guess some people had a hard stop. We do have some questions which are all okay, we could take them. For what alternative revenue models could you possibly look for? I think the questions that have come in the Q&A session, a few of them have already been answered. So maybe you should pick and choose. Just one. For Mr Apuji, how is the subscription worked out for money control? Just throw some highlights on that. How is it worked out for money control.com? And what has been the growth in it? In fact, I addressed, I answered two Bhavesh privately also. As I said, later on, it's been quite a phenomenal growth for us during the period and in general through the year. That's because we've been diminutive and incremental value every month and specifically during this period, we saw almost a 30-40% spike in the paying subscribers coming to Bhavesh. Which is how are publications going to manage the change in third-party cookies being depreciated? What impact do you think we have on ad revenue? I think tech is already working on this because this is something that's been in the works for a while. For us personally, if you see, we have a DMP. So the level of data that we get using the DMP as a backend is extremely efficient and it is from what I'm told from our DMP supplier is that we are future safe from that perspective. So I think just doing it through the third-party cookies of the old ways, I don't think that is going to work in the future. And just if you could all just give your final thoughts on how do you see the industry evolving going ahead? You have spoken about it, but what would be your key takeaway from COVID and how do you see your company particularly evolving, retaining the consumer most of all if you're going ahead? Just final thoughts. Yeah, so I think yeah we talked about it. There's definitely a change. Spends, advertising spends are going to be smaller and we as a company, we are looking at other ways and changing our revenue models where we are trying to be more of IT partners for some of our clients. We're looking at affiliate marketing. We are also considering paid subscriptions for our e-papers which we haven't done so far. So these are some of the revenue models that we are exploring at this point. When and how far it will come back to how it used to be is still to be seen. Thank you. Bobby, what about you? What can you expect from Manoroma online? Can somebody repeat the question? What can we expect from Manoroma online looking ahead? I guess she's saying what's the new normal for Malayalam Manoroma, Bobby? Hi, thank you for asking for all of us. New normal is pretty much, we are very high so our core strength is Malayalam and Kerala SSD. This is specifically put for our second generation Malayalis like somebody has mentioned they can speak Malayalam and Kerala. So this led us to that. Now coming to the question, see new normal is something which actually got into a fast-paced mode because of the situation we are put into, right? Now the social distancing, work from home, there are a lot of things which actually happened which actually is augmenting what was supposed to happen then maybe two or three years. It actually fastened the process. Now for the traditional players like us, the biggest challenge is to balance both traditional and modern, no online, no medium because still our print forest is still growing. We are talking about 25 lakhs copies plus every day, right? We are already on top 10 huge tables in the world from a small stage. Thanks to our literacy maybe. But the thing is that it's going to be still growing in India but print has been launched in India. Second one coming to the other medium, what will happen? There is a bit of convergence definitely happening already. It will actually make in a very fast pace. Now we are talking about radio stations, it will go into the radio, they have to explore television, already they are doing an oddity and that kind of stuff. So this kind of convergence media will definitely take a lead now. But traditional media is pretty much going to be there and they are still 90% of our audience. Ritesh, what about you, just your philosophy? Yeah, yeah. So I think from a digital only perspective, I think all those strategies that you know you started, when you actually start the organization, you put out these nice Excel sheets and strategies saying that you know how you need to build your audience, how you need to increase your number of page views, how you need to put the relevant content to make sure that you increase that page views and that would obviously convert into revenues. Now I think the last two months we realized post pandemic, we realized that that situation is obviously not happening. So how do we actually start reinventing the entire process right now? So we have taken a call to make sure that we have a lot more engaged with our regular reader and how do we make sure that you know we can convert that reader into a paying customer who can support our journalism at the end of the day. So that's what we are actually working towards right now. Mr. Puneet, what about you? Where would the growth area come from you, particularly on the digital front, because you have various sectors also within the larger networking digital platform. So if you could just tell us what your thoughts on that. Yeah I think the fact that we have a television sort of big television network it actually complements and helps the digital growth but specifically on digital you know what we think one is the way we work and the way we operate will be completely getting transformed over a period of time and that's true for all of us and you know I think from an audience perspective yesterday these are spikes, will they stay? Will they stay? Probably not but I think as we go along the audience that we are able to retain and people who stay with us will definitely add on a completely new layer of audience which traditionally in a normal environment would have required a lot of marketing dollars with very very little ROI and I think the third thing is it will fundamentally change how we are engaging with our advertisers you know there will be the traditional kind of advertising that will keep happening but I think the differential value is very very good to deliver scale and engagement you know for the advertiser not only in form of planning but it also in form of enabling conversations because that's that's starting to become a lot more important for advertising. And finally Mr. Srinivas you've been a big proponent of digital so what I want to know is you know you're one of the first to go behind the paywall with the subscriptions and content behind paywall so when do you see digital you know giving a making or rather giving a print revenue run for their money when do you see digital? Yeah that's a that's a great question I have to I have to admit this you know when when Covid started in the three weeks that we actually didn't reach the customer we we completely went blank you know till then I think we must have taken print for granted because there was so much coming in and everything was gung-ho the moment the print revenue stopped we just hit a blank wall and then after three weeks when we started printing and people started buying it and then everything started going back to at least a reasonable level of normalcy I think we we have to understand that digital is here meant to supplement complement and append to everything that we do in print and we also believe that for the actually for the first time digital has driven print consumption so we actually were able to tell our readers where you can find your copies when you can find your copies and how to reach out your agents and pick up your copies so we found a lot of synergies between the two and I believe we are going to be completely working between the two I think it will take a few years still for digital to over overtake print I think that's going to still take a while but digital last year we closed with 20 percent of our revenues coming in from digital and this year we believe that he will be able to you know go close to 28 to 30 percent of our revenues coming in from digital so of course the markets have to open up and covid has to you know get back to some some degree of normalcy but the two things that we've completely learned is how can I move my fixed cost to become my variable cost which means how do I attribute my cost to our revenue so that when the revenue doesn't come I can call my cost you know if we don't get this act together I think we are really going to be in trouble times this is one big lesson that covid has taught me and the second thing is there is you know your customer or your client comes before everything else so as far as a customer or our client is concerned we will do everything in our power to be able to make his investment work for him so what can we do to provide max ROI to our customer especially at a time like this to our clients especially at trouble times like this for that you know we've started you know we've even got a little bit into Rohit's way we've started you know coming up with creatives for advertisements we've started shooting advertisement commercials we used to be only in you know the production of tv series and in otd platform now we started shooting ads you know we started using our you know our social media to promote those ads so there's a whole load of things that we can do for our customer for our clients and I believe as long as we leave no stone unturned create more and more opportunities for revenue and make sure that you're able to map every item of cost to a revenue which can be groomed or cut then I think we should be on a decent that is the new normal for me Rohit you have competition but also your company and if you were to you know advise your brands on digital news how they could you know add more or rather how could a digital news platform add value to your brand any specific things that you'd like to mention no we've worked very closely with a bunch of brands actually I've been in conversation with big nations team as well on this where we try and see how I mean so far what we've done is be brands and news networks we kind of make ancillary content with it so say for example if you're promoting a show on Netflix which is about say there's a show called Jamtara which was on the fake calls that you were getting the phishing call we tied up with news networks etc to kind of bringing the story of Jamtara bringing the story of phishing and how that has impacted etc so to kind of generate interest in the show so there's always been ancillary programming that we do around news channels news networks etc to promote shows products and things so that's that has happened in the past I think that that'll only get stronger going forward because see the thing is I think in the days of people nobody goes searching for an ad right people are going looking for content and sometimes that content happens to be an ad and that's what it is and nobody makes content better than news networks are sitting here so this is content that people are actively looking for and we can put ourselves in there and at least put pass off some form of communication so we are that's where we are at thank you so much gentlemen and the lady for taking time out it was really insightful we got to learn a lot thank you so much thank you thank you thank you thank you guys you guys bye