 and good evening and thank you for joining us on a Friday evening on a rainy day in Mumbai and I'm told it's pouring heavily in Kottayam as well. I hope we'll make your weekend worthwhile with this interesting chat with one of the leading ladies in our digital ecosystem in India. As many of you know, Maria Mathew is the CEO of Malayalam Anurma online. She's been instrumental in you know leading the digital initiatives of the group. Interestingly, this is something I did not know. I must confess Malayalam Anurma was one of the early entrants in the digital space. They set up their digital arm 24 years back, which makes it late 90s when most of us were trying to figure out what digital means. Malayalam Anurma as you all know is one of India's oldest publications. It was established in 1888. It's exactly now it makes it 132 years. It has a daily circulation of 2.31 million and has over 40 publications. The group also runs Manurma News, a 24 hour news channel, Manurma Max and Entertainment Channel and Radio Mango FM stations in Kerala. Malayalam Anurma also the online business that Mariam leads also attracts 36 million unique visitors a month, which is a fairly significant number given the size of the population in Kerala. Malayalam Anurma online is the top Malayalam news website. The news portal comprises of almost 30 dedicated channels from news to movies to technology and features. And as some of you might know, Malayalam Anurma is also a pioneer in setting up classified business in their respective digital spaces. No wonder they're a very heavily awarded company. I don't think we have time to go through their list of awards, but just to mention a few classified businesses they run, which is their matrimonial business called M for Mari, the education portal called Manurma Horizon, Hello Address, which is Kerala based exclusive real estate portal, quick Kerala, Kerala's own business search engine, QK Doc, Kerala's hospital appointment app. All of this and more is under Mariam's portfolio. She's an alumina of St. Siefens College in Delhi from where she did her BA economics. And she's also an MBA from the Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh before Malayalam Anurma, Mariam worked with JP Chase Morgan in New York. Thank you, Mariam for joining us on a rainy evening. Good to have you here. Very interested to know what you're doing in leading the Malayalam Anurma's digital initiatives. Before I get to that, let me just ask briefly though there's been enough said and written about that. Belated happy Onam to you. First of all, how's been the Onam season in Kerala? Onam season for it depends on what product you're talking about, but digital it's been very good. You know, we've had, like we were talking about just before we got in, Kerala has been going through some interesting ups and downs in the last few years and our just before the Onam season is our rainy season and the last few years we've had floods. So, which is, you know, Onam season is normally our peak season when it comes to revenue. So, it has kind of, it affected us in many ways, but what I always talk about is the incredible spirit of Malayalis and people from Kerala. They have this, you know, there is a concept of coming together and building up and pushing it up. So, really over the years, despite the floods and despite COVID and everything else, there is a spirit which kind of is pushing this state together having said that. I mean, we are all suffering in terms of economy, especially travel and tourism this year because you know, that is a large percentage of our revenues, travel and tourism and even medical tourism because a lot of people come from all over the world to the for the hospitals and even the hospitals are all affected because of the current pandemic which is there. But overall this thing in terms of business, in terms of revenues, Onam this year was not bad for digital. That's good to hear. That's good to hear. Your digital business is from what I understand three large pillars. One is obviously your news business which stands the tallest and then there is the classifieds business and there's entertainment which also includes the OTT piece and, you know, videos also kind of cuts across all of that. And as I mentioned at the start, Malayalam Aroma has been a company that's kind of pioneered from the, you know, regional new space being a pioneer in the digital business. Would you like to tell us a little bit about, you know, when the digital part of the business was set up because, you know, when it was set up, I'm sure most of the companies in India did not, you know, not know what digital business was. So what was the kind of vision behind setting it up and, you know, how did it happen? So actually Malayalam Aroma online was set up in 1997. We had Prince Philip had come to India and he's the one who inaugurated the English website TheWeek.com which is part of our magazines which we had and since then we started it. It was started as an HTML website and then of course by 2001 we had launched it as an overall one-stop shop, content shop for Malayalis all over the world. The idea being from the beginning the whole vision was and the vision was actually that of at that time our 90-year-old chief editor Mr. K. Matthew who said that, listen, I love my newspaper and it is my history and everything but I think the future is digital and we need to look at it very seriously and it was soon after that I had come in from New York at that point of time and he was very keen because he was sure that this is going to be the future and even then at that point of time we looked at digital as something which is not going to be just let's just try and let's just putter around with this thing but to look at it very seriously and see what it is that it can do for everybody and that it had to be a profit center on its own. It would not be one of those which is, you know, in Malayalam works like that that it cannot just bleed like that and put a lot of money in there and let's see where it goes. So we started on a very small and extremely small team, a hungry team which wanted to prove itself and we kind of built up as it went and the whole trajectory at that point was we first started off because we were Kerala and Malayalis and you know that Malayalis are all over the world. They say that if you go to a tea shop in Antarctica you're going to find one Malayali there also. So we first targeted the Malayalis who were outside of Kerala because that was a low-hanging fruit for us obviously and once we kind of realized that there was great traction for this product and again it goes back to the nuances of Kerala. So Kerala has always been that state which is interested in news, which is interested in having their discussions on news, life revolves around, you know, all these opinions and politics. So this kind of this product evolved around the the Kerala mindset of you know just that which is how do we get people to sit and talk and be part of the news process and so even then we realized that you know it is not it could not be one of those spaces where like the fourth estate of the past we kind of give the news and leave it there and that's it. So even very early on in its raw form and its basic form we decided that we need to have news which is kind of also comes in from our users. Users had to be part had a need to have a stake in the product and then as we kind of developed the product we realized that you know there are other things you know we wanted to try different things. Mobile, I think we started a mobile product in Malayali in 2005 when at that point of time in one of those Nokia phones you know that point when we talked about apps. App website, used to be another app website yes. Exactly, so you know and then we went on to do our you know we did Apple phones, we did skill sets in Amazon. We the whole idea was you know go out and try and try and try and experiment as much because it was still very early stages and we wanted to kind of and our whole philosophy was experiment as much fail in things which is not going to work and find things which is actually going to work for us and that was the mindset going in and when we looked at when we looked at Manorama online per se we kind of looked at to see this product Malayalam Manorama the brand and where it stood in Kerala and Malayalam Manorama the brand if you as you would have said that you know we have 50 different publications we have television we have radio which came actually subsequently but this product kind of spans the entire lifespan of people so we have a children's magazine onwards we have things for literary products we have travel products so the idea was that Manorama online would harness the power of all these things that we had and then bring it to people in the format that they want see right so now a lot of things for example classifieds and classifieds was considered to be murder used to define classified as the gold rush of newspapers and somewhere I think in the whole excitement of internet and all that we completely forgot that this particular part was you know absolutely the most important part of newspapers and a lot of newspapers I think had a tough time because you know Craigslist came in and took away a lot of that part of the business so when we looked at our users we said that no we need to get something for our users for everything so that it's products that they can use it's not just just one one kind of dimensional relationship it's a multi-dimensional relationship that we built with the users and that really is a crux of the concept of Malayalam online which is bringing the users to the brand in every which way the way they want it so tell me it was very early days for you know digital news in India in the early 2000 and as you rightly said that Manorama is not a company that will keep you know pumping in money with some so-called and you know distant monetary goals what made the company the group invested in digital especially at that time and digital advertising was a small pie technology still required investment one part is understood that the world was moving digital but there was very little money to go around the pie is still even small today but at that time what made the group you know put its kind of muscle behind it when you know there was very little business in it like I said see there was there was always the the vision that this is going to be the the product of the future but when we invested in the products the things we invested in was we didn't invest in 100 people we invested in five people but five very good people we insisted on investing in very good technology because the first version of what we launched actually the technology was great but you know the partners at that time like you said were very new to use the technology it was a mess and I still remember one of my biggest failures in life I always say is you know I had just come from New York and I was launching this new product and it was all this fancy CMS and all that and the entire manorama was there for the launch and five minutes before we press the button because we're already announcing the newspaper that the you know the site is coming up the site crashed and I had no idea what to tell this in a whole bunch of expecting people that you know we're starting out this new future and guess what the future is crashing around me so we learned a lot of lessons in the early years so even though there's good technology you need good people to build that technology and use that technology but we were very cautious about how much we spent and we were not we were not kind of loosely doing that so we were thinking through this whole process expenditure was equally as important as revenue and we were also very conscious about revenues right so we we we did feel that there was there was money in the market that we needed to get and it was being a first you know mover in this we had that advantage of being helping to teach the market along with us what this product is and I think that's what happened a lot of we had a lot of people who we sat and we explained what this product is and got them in to sell it and expect experience it and in the early state because again like I said the early stages was a lot of people outside of the country and using the product what it was in the early years was that Manorama as a brand was you know if a brand advertising the paper people knew it was legit right it was a it was a legit brand but a lot of the children of you know parents who are living here were outside the country so they would see the advertisements in digital and then they would kind of call their parents and say listen I saw this what do you think and the parents say oh yeah of course it's there in the newspaper it's kind of so it kind of tied together the print and the digital tied together and so we got a lot of traction from our revenues even in the beginning you know I remember in the first month or second month it said we got our first advertisement and we were so excited about it but also we were very clear that this is a product which had to sell so there was no there was a time you know when it when you talk to marketing people and when we started up we only had I only had one you know marketing salesperson in online so I would talk to the printed people and say listen please send sell digital as well and the first thing that came was okay we'll give this for free and one of the things that we said from the beginning was no we will not give it for free it is not going to be so it has a value it will not be in you know add on okay listen at you if you take this much of print I'll give you this for free so we were very clear about that so even in terms of now if you talk about today's DNA and we talk about networks and direct ads we're very clear that direct advertisements are the ones which are is a way to go networks is not the way to go and I know my sales team sometimes kind of you know get very upset about the fact that I keep pushing no no no you need to get that networks is only backfill 20% 30% never more than that but we're insistent on that that that's the way to go and so it is a constant balance there are of course if there have been years when our expenses have been much more than our revenues but those are the years when we kind of spend more on investments but technology understanding that that will help us in some process but we've kind of you know even in terms of workflows we've worked on the workflows in such a way that editorial team gets a lot of you know it is empowered to do a lot of things we don't unnecessary waste is just not kind of encouraged fantastic two three things are interesting that you elaborated so well I'm going to pick you up on the revenue and the investment part again you know when we come to the OTT piece because that's kind of the equations are very different there but just for my understanding and I've seen this happening across many news companies especially print companies where you know digital has been run by a separate team in a different silo and typically what has ended up happening is editorial and news is kind of uncoordinated if I can use that word business teams are kind of scattered all over there's no one kind of broad philosophy and especially I asked this question Manurma has been a brand which is good for editorial ethos right the newspaper I know that the newspaper was shot during the freedom struggle and it has a very rich legacy and history for a company like this to one get into digital early as you explained and then to kind of you know bring the news pieces together of print and digital what kind of effort did it require like everywhere is it's not an easy set right and you throw to that somebody who's the common and seen that this is your future and it might be also you know going to take away your future it's not it's not the best way to start your relationships but I think I I think a lot of things we did was one was this concept of convergence right even before it became the word of the day we we insisted that the editorial team was very much part of the decision-making thing decision-making system of Manurma online so we were very particular we one the ethos of Malala Manurma we did not want to kind of change at all with digital and you know there is temptation because when you change it and I know for a fact that if I do a lot of stories which I some of our competitors or other sites do my numbers would be three times or four times and it's sometimes my younger editorial team will always say listen why can't we do this let's push it a little bit but we have been very particular that this is what we stand for I mean journalism for with the cause you know our content has its ethos we don't want to kind of break that element of it so we've kind of worked I won't say it's a seamless experience but we do a lot of work with the print team and we I know there is a lot of give and take there is push and pull in all this relationship but I find that especially in the last few years it's become so much more easier because now the acceptance of digital is much there yeah in the first few years it was more of me giving the ideas and they kind of saying okay fine but now you know we get so many ideas from the print team itself that it's we are finding it difficult because it's really good ideas and it's their products so yeah now we're finding it difficult to kind of respond to all of them because you know this everybody wants to do something interesting tell me how do you compete with the external world when as you've seen what happens with digital news there is no sanitization right you have all kinds of content and for good or bad people are also consuming that content and for a newspaper brand with this kind of legacy there are a lot of content areas that you won't venture into so how do you compete with that world outside where you know it's for lack of better term an unlevel playing field so to say but you know what we've uh having said that in the last 20 plus years we've seen that good content always brings it brings back the customers and the customers are coming in other loyal customers they're not the customers who are you know so now for example and you're going to talk about Facebook and Google and all those things but when we see our traffic for example again like the whole marketing piece even our traffic piece we insist that our traffic we may try and get most of it at least 50 percent of our traffic through direct traffic because we want them to come for the product for the content and that's what we that's the kind of loyal customers who come back again and again they are the ones who are going to be there on our website throughout the ones who come from say a Facebook story or you know one of those more interesting stories are the ones who are going to be there for under 30 seconds and the other ones therefore we have people sitting to our average side of sometimes 10 to 12 minutes because people go through so many pages so let me come to the next piece mariam which is you know which is again something i've seen a large number of print companies not do successfully not just in india but globally which is you know transform their mainstay of revenue of classifieds into an online classified business and as we've seen the classifieds business is very fragmented now owned by multiple companies real estate is owned by you know three four large national players so is matrimony so is other businesses malala maruma has been fairly successful at that what is the recipe for that success again persistence and trying to convince the print team that this is what they should be looking at in the future you know when we start in the beginning i would sit in marketing meetings and i would say you know print is dead and digital will come and sure enough the next person after we would be the classifieds head of classifieds he said what she's talking is rubbish and print is never going to die fortunately for me he became my best friend and partner you know very early on many when he realized he said that you know what there is some truth to it so let's try it out and so we started off our venture into m for mary our matrimony website 12 years ago we started this and the traction we got immediately was unbelievable you know we really did not think that this was the kind of traction we would get and we were not the first who was for this particular market obviously there was already other competitors in the market but because with the manorama brand and the the trust which comes with it and matrimony being such a big element trust being such a big element of matrimonial m for mary quickly became the number one brand for matrimony in kerala and we also kind of got into the process of teaching people how to use m for mary how to use matrimonial websites and in the last maybe two three years ago was when the digital revenues took over the print revenues in terms of you know until then the print matrimonial revenues were still more than the digital revenues and the last few years the digital revenues took over and now we've expanded to outside of kerala we just this year launched in the other southern states of karnataka and padesh, selangana and thamandalu because we felt that there was a attraction for this product and it was something which we could expand on what see when the classified business started shifting from print to digital a lot of players were able to make a national mark so whether you have you know matrimony you have real estate kerala is an unusual state in that sense where you know local players have held sway so what differentiates kerala from other markets of course there is you know early investment by players like malayalam manorama persistence as you call it but the national players who made you know headways into the large national markets also have deep pockets they've also tried hard in kerala so what's been the difference in kerala according to you i think the brand malayalam manorama and what it stands for i mean it really has made a lot of difference because the the the readers of this brand uh the people in kerala have a are very connected to this brand and it is it is not about uh it is not so and they're so possessive about the brand in that if we do anything wrong they're the first ones to correct us and say listen this is not the way to go this is not how you should do it so we have been very careful about what we do and how we do it and that really has made a lot of difference in the kerala market and also because it you know there's a lot of in all these products there is a there is a certain market we we are lucky we also have the largest media vehicles when we launch the product we have the paper to kind of do it now we have television we have radio so it does help in that sense you know even if you don't have monetary investments which the other big brands have we have the vehicle to kind of reach our our users so that helps as well and as you know and i think at the end of the day it goes back to the product you have a good product and you you have a product which talks to your people and that's really where even you know from the beginning manorama has come from which is it's a regional brand and we've thought we've always been niche we've not been we don't want to go to the white noise of i mean when everybody is there there's a lot of noise going on a lot of things your attention is kind of diverted to a lot of a lot of places newspaper everything we've kind of said that this is this is our market we know our market we understand our market we know the people yeah this is where we this is what is our strength very relevant let me come back to the news piece now and you know subscription revenues has been uh you know important for print players in kerala unlike you know some of the national players we've seen what newspapers globally have done the ones that have kind of you know made a go for subscription revenues have survived the storm the others have not so much digital news is a very different kettle of fish not many companies have managed to crack that code there are baby steps Indian companies are taking what has been Malayalam experience in that area so we thought we would go into this whole digital subscription revenues very early on which was i think maybe 10 15 years ago when we launched our e-edition we thought we should give it for pay and honestly at that time it was not the lack of people who wanted to pay but the lack of a good payment service engine payment engine which kind of made us within a few months we kind of turned it off and we said listen everything is free because it's just not possible for us to charge because it's there were no good payment engines at that point of time but eventually when we started going into our magazine products and those are niche products we said that see the magazine products for example banita which is our highest selling magazine in the largest circle in the country we did not want to give that away for free we did not want to even and so we were like even if there is a website which is we were going to have as of now we have the e-editions of it and we started off paid i don't remember when but i'm thinking six seven years ago at least and we were very particular that okay the niche products are going to go behind a paywall we haven't figured the paywall thing is yet but whatever it is if you want to see this product you need to pay for it and that's how we started two years ago even the e-paper went behind the paywall because we said that you know there was a huge traction for it and people were willing to take it actually there were enough and more people said this important behind a paywall we're willing to take it we had talked to our customers and a lot of them are willing to kind of pay for it and now you know honestly as you said that you know with with all that is changing in the industry and what is going on if you i mean if you look at yourself i'm sure if you see on your phone i don't know you probably don't even know how many apps you're paying for how many you know services you're paying for you know there are a lot of fans when people are telling you another thing that listen i i'm trying to see where my you know small small payments going to these small small apps which you started off and you're not even stopped using so i think the with the with the coming of netflix and you know amazon prime and all people have started getting used to the concept of paying and that's the natural transition and i think even for us we are we are like other companies in the country and in the world we are looking and going somewhere into pay maybe in a year or two years time maybe because really that is the future because you want there will be a bunch of people who will only want free but there will also be a bunch of people who want who are willing to pay for certain extra services that you're willing to give them and frankly speaking you know this whole concept i mean i think the media industry shot itself in its foot but not but not taking its content seriously and thinking that it should just go out there for free when you know there's a lot of money being invested in this content i mean if you look at it if you look at it um it's easy for us when you say because we're taking a lot of the content from print there's a lot of money being spent other there's a lot of good journalistic work going on there so if you want to continue with that we need to invest in that and to invest in that we need to get revenues and that's scale and right now digital is not making the scale of revenues that uh see a print is making i think uh when it comes to uh subscription revenues applications in kerala i've still had added better because of their forward-looking thinking otherwise if you look at some of the players in some other regions and english players they've not really managed to monetize and one is not sure now when it comes to print specifically uh whether the you know bus is already left because now for one to increase cover prices and try to monetize it again there are too many fragmented sources of information one has one of the other interesting things i i noticed or i heard you speak in an interview where you spoke about cannibalizing self right which is about you know kind of disrupting your own business or doing multiple things you know we do that all the time in our business our teams sit together on the same table and they say oh why are we doing this we have something similar going on already it's like a gc doing you know three channels which are mass entertainment which is kind of disrupting self over the weekend uh last weekend i read this book by bob eiger which is an autobiography called ride of a lifetime where he talks about disrupting his own business unless you disrupt and cannibalize your own business or somebody else will right absolutely i mean i i that's the reason why we kind of try out everything so you know whatever we hear in the market we you will if we think that it works for us and if we think it's going to make sense we try it out the concept being that you try early and if it doesn't work you fail and you fail quickly and then you pivot so i mean even in terms of classified we've got so we launched so many classified products we launched an olex kind of product which we finally said listen this will never make money in the future why are we wasting our money on that time on that but we tried it out because we thought we had a coupon based product which we call a deal which we just kind of stopped recently about six months ago because uh we really truly feel that you know instead of somebody else coming and disrupting your business model it's important that you kind of try everything that works for your readers and the main thing in all this is to understand your customers right and kind of see where they're going and kind of follow them and see what works for you as a company when you follow them because a lot of things which they want to do maybe you cannot do as a company but you must try it out and then kind of see whether it kind of works with you or not and if it doesn't it's fine the important thing is to also take the decision the right not to kind of be so hold on to things you have to kind of say okay listen I tried this it did not work the way I wanted to I need to let it go or I need to pivot I think sometimes we get so attached to things that we create that we kind of say okay no we cannot do anything about it and that is when we have issues really but if we if we can kind of pivot or let go I think it's an important very important thing that we should try and destroy you see even in terms of editorial thinking I mean every time you know it's a tough sell you know when you think but you have to say you have to get the print guide or the guy who is writing texts now to think about voice and talk about videos I mean because that's where it's going you cannot just say listen I'm only going to do text because that's not the future is something else and you have to start thinking through that as well let me pick you up on the subscription revenue thing again what's your outlook on that you know we've also saw during covid times times of India is partially going behind a paywall not like pull on but you know they put parts of their thing nationally business standard has been behind a paywall part paywall for a while hindu has done that what's your outlook for the paywall industry in India digital news paywall is there opportunity for a significant upside or do you think there is enough options for the consumers quickly to jump to the you know because eventually what we are looking at is a you know critical mass of consumers coming on there is no doubt some will pay but really you want millions to pay otherwise you know it doesn't work very early stages still I think the reason being that the Indian industries a lot different is still a very strong part of the Indian industry and media industry and I don't think it will go away that quickly in the future so but I think also that people are recognizing the value of subscription based products you know frankly speaking I have people even telling me listen you give me a product which has no advertisements and I'll pay for it you know as simple as that so I think there's a demand for it and like you said right now it's the lower hanging fruit so people want to come in for but I think in the in the next few years you're going to see more and more publishers going behind a paywall yes I think so too but the jury is out in terms of you know how much subscription revenues will come in let me now come to the you know newest part of your business which is the OTT business and that's again an area where you know fresh content investment is required unlike print where you know you started with a significant base of content here you're doing two things one obviously you're taking content from your news television business you're bringing content from your entertainment TV business at the same time also putting in you know original content investments there are there have been a lot of OTT kind of models across the world as well as in India and as terminology goes we call them S-word we call them A-word what's been Malayalam Anurma's experience we know you launched last year in September so it's been exactly a year the COVID is not the right time to get the right kind of experience in this area but short duration 12 months what's been your experience of the OTT play so for us like every other product when we started we don't believe in starting like spending a lot of money in starting it so we start small and we had certain goals which we were hoping that we would reach and frankly speaking I don't know whether it's COVID or not but it achieved much more than what we thought we would achieve we have as of now I don't want to say the word you used earlier because you have people now listening to me but we have a combination of an A-word and an S-word model that is frankly speaking the model which we have right now and it's working because there is like I said there is an element of the people who want to see something between nation different and they want to see to the time they want the way they want it and there are others who are willing to wait for it so our particular product is based right now on this I know eventually it's going to go into and like I said it's still very early days so we cannot kind of say that one is better than the other and where are we getting more money from just because it's still experimental stages but yes to get new content is a lot of investments and we do realize that and we are playing it like everything else cautiously and understanding our market and kind of trying to see how it works frankly speaking even the strategy of how to place the content what kind of contents the old contents have been bringing in also a lot of you know films and all which have worked for us it seems to be working for us and it's also also things like a reality engaging reality TV you know so that seems to be you know like con vinegar corroborating kind of thing where you're getting them to kind of participate in your process of think it's baby steps still very early but having said that I think the team is very happy because they managed to achieve the number they set out for September they've gone beyond that far beyond that so they're very happy about it that's fantastic to know but if you look at the OTT piece and the kind of digital you know web piece so to say now you know both of them are converging somewhere right OTT is primarily video driven your web pieces are still you know their combination I would say of text voice video and at some point of time you know all of these pieces will start emerge start kind of converging completely so that you have one engine which is delivering content for the users whether it is you know text voice or video staying on the OTT part Mariam we've seen nationally you know OTTs now have been in play for India has now I'm told 32 OTTs some 32 OTT players and Kerala has also become a you know market that is competitive in many ways large national players are present Malala Malorma is there there are other players also there eventually you know this space will require significant content investment right so are you geared up to do that say to look out three to five years from now because running a piece which is completely feeding only of TV content might be a good start but you know it might not sustain you beyond you know one two years absolutely we have I mean a planning process includes original content we already have a couple of you you know web series and original content which is even one of what's so definitely that's very much part of the mix of the content that we're going to have obviously it cannot be just what is there on television both for Marvel which is our entertainment channel and MFTV but we have additional content and that that is that is going to be a future investments are going to be in that stream itself and are you already taking content investment decisions for television keeping you know what works on OTT in mind or that kind of oh absolutely absolutely I mean we started doing that when we started thinking about the OTT process itself so even while we were building the product itself we started thinking that okay this is this is going to be our future so we need to kind of figure out a content based on that right and tell me give us a view from Kerala in terms of you know how the kind of again the SWAT versus AWAT play will work because you know globally as let me take examples for instance most of the OTT plays that initially started were for some time AWAT driven and then they became SWAT for some time then back to AWAT and now they're a combination last I heard now Star has put a IPL behind a completely SWAT model this year IPL is not available to you know viewers for free on hotstar so everybody has been kind of dabbling with both the models doing a kind of hybrid you know combination of model what's the view from Kerala what are you guys thinking what is Malayalam and Orma thinking on where the market is going frankly speaking it's still too early but I am one of those people who doesn't believe in Kerala you know I don't believe that you can continue this AWAT and SWAT model for a long period of time you either I mean at some point of time all of us will have to take a you know put a stake in the non-sending this is what we need to do and that is going to probably take a while though because it's still very early for us to kind of say that this is where what will work for us you know 12 months and that too in these unusual times is really not time for us to tell you I can't actually say that is it SWAT or AWAT that I want to go because I think in another couple of years time if you come back to me I will tell you exactly what is the model which will work for us but we are experimenting right now so very early and from a cannibalization again I keep going back to the same theme because you know eventually business are built by as you yourself believe in self-destruction does putting content free on OTT placed cannibalize your TV business in some manner there is of course a line of thought which says that you know it helps popularize and deepens the affinity with the content but at the same time on OTT if you're giving that content free at some stage the viewer will start getting weaned away especially because you know OTT is not by appointment. So you know the thing is that okay fine so this these customers you're talking about I mean this is the conversation where I have regularly with every different product radio or print or whatever and this whole concept of cannibalization because I truly believe in it because if these guys are moving away they're moving away for a reason and if you don't have a product out there they're going to go to somebody else so you know you might as well give your product give your product the first shot to kind of get them to come there it really doesn't make a difference there's no point in holding on to anything if I don't do it in this I'm going to save my old legacy media it's not it doesn't work like that because if your customer has moved on somewhere your customer is going to find that that you have to go where the customer is you cannot force the customer to come to you I sometimes feel that a lot of times people are trying to say listen I want you to do this and you're going to do it this way even as a customer myself I'm not going to let anybody tell me how I should use when I should use or what I should use each of us is different and you know in all the products if you my own use and look at your own usage you don't like to be dictated upon so why should you dictate on to somebody else then I think fair enough fair point customer is evolving and you know eventually the other important and interesting aspect of OTTs that we've seen you know in some of the larger you know national plays if I can call it that for lack of better word is that a lot of OTTs have now become aggregators so they are you know they are aggregating and buying content from everywhere they're not run by specific you know media groups or television channels if I can call it that and they buy content across the board is that a trend that has started in Kerala already where you are for example are you putting content on your OTT which you are buying from you know for example competing television channels is that happening um competing television channels as of now no but we are buying stuff from everywhere else but we not not competition so far fantastic I'm going to pick up some audience question now questions now so there's a question from Raju Nayar which says great to be here I to help from Kutayam the headquarters of Malayalam Malorma and this is a pioneer in Kerala I believe as Kerala platforms perhaps a need for a trade stroke stroke business journal that highlights development and potential of Kerala and not just political news I'm sure Malayalam Malorma is covering quite a bit of that you want to you have anything to say on that so yeah I think we do have a gap on business journalism we're building on that part of it we have something called sambathiam which is our which is our business magazine it's a personal finance magazine and in the last one year we've kind of expanded on that and we're working on that to be you know that more developed product and your main paper anyway does business coverage but that is limited because we have magazines which kind of do more focused coverage and that's where we're going like I said we take content from everywhere so that's and that team is not developing fresh content for so the way online works is that you know from it's changed a lot in the past that initially we start up most of the content was coming from the print products now we have 30 percent of the content coming from print products we have an additional 70 percent which is done by the online editorial team because we need to obviously give a lot more than what is there so business is one of those elements which we are now developing focusing and developing much more fantastic another question on Malorma max how are you gearing up to handle competition from national players including the likes of amazon netflix who are also looking at regional content the same way as we gear up for national players for every product right and we we feel that we need to we understand the pulse of the people and our users and we are I mean we can never compete in terms of you know if you even talk about Facebook or Google you want to talk about which is we can never compete in terms of the money people invest and we can only compete in terms of the quality of content we can compete in terms of the knowledge of the users I mean these are the ways we compete we and the fact is that at the end of the day you need to know your users when that really is the finally the the crux of the issue and and you have to have good content so we feel that the close to combination of those to be really able to compete with all the national players trusting you mentioned that let me now pick you up on that issue that we thought we'll also discuss about you know how Facebook Google using content curated by news publishers kind of run away with the agenda and also with the money pie enough and more has been written about you know what would have been done and what's been run wrong but if you were to offer you know two three kind of fixes so to say what would they be what would what could for example the digital news publishers do to get their fair share of revenue from the digital advertising ecosystem see if I knew a fix out there I would be you know I would sell into the whole world I can only say what we what we believe in and Google and Facebook is is like this you know huge wheel which is trying to take over the entire world and it's we're all very small pairs compared to that I think the way like I said finally at the end of the day you have to believe in the product right and you have to kind of say I will not be dependent on say a traffic right my traffic cannot be dependent on Google and Facebook because they keep changing this so-called algorithms of theirs which is this black box which they think is the greatest and which sometimes makes no sense whatsoever and or they it's and it keeps changing right so if you're going to be dependent on those two to get your traffic you're in trouble first of all you need to build a brand where you can say your traffic is coming to you directly similarly even for revenues I mean if you're going to start working on you know say that 70% or 80% of my revenue is coming from networks and you're you're gone I mean at the end of the day you have to say listen I have a product it's a good product and I want you advertisers to come to me directly and you're not going to get me through networks so if you want to come to me you have to come to me I mean it's simple things that even aggregators we're not an aggregators we're not in a daily hunt because we truly believe that you know if you want to see Malala Manama come to Malala Manama don't go to a daily hunt where my product is a commoditized product with somebody else and you won't even know which is my content versus somebody else's and 90% of the time half the other products there are cut and paste of our products you know so we don't want to kind of be that so you have to at some you have to say that listen you have to find your niche and then excel in the niche and sell the niche as what it is I think very relevant also that dovetails with your point about you know directly selling rather than you know going through platforms because the passion that your own sales team can bring to the table when you're dealing with advertisers no faceless you know programmatic platform can bring to that let me move to the next question from Ashok Vidya Sagar it says what do you foresee as a break even point for OTT if you only create originals and what kind of investments do you see going in for Malala say very early so I'm going to refrain from commenting on that one let me ask you a larger piece say you know we are sitting in 2020 five years out what do you what is your assessment on how much would digital revenue be part of your group as a percentage we don't want exact numbers but where would the rough ballpark be five years out if subscription and all comes through I would think that it would be a significant percentage but until we do subscriptions it's never going to be equivalent anywhere close to see right now if print revenue digital revenues over under five percent under you know of more in all of India is like that right under five to 10 percent of print revenues but with subscription products coming in I think it's going to be a significant percentage are we going to be the larger percentage like in in Europe and America right now no it will probably take you longer than five years but I think it'll become a significant portion of revenues what do you think the government can do in this is there does the government have a role to play I know you guys also formed the digital news publishers association two years back which has got done some interface with the government is there so why I asked this question is for example Australia is bringing in a law which requires you know Facebook to pay news publishers for the content that goes from there or share revenue right is that something that you know would you like to happen in India or what else can the government do to kind of ecosystem absolutely I think the government needs to kind of get involved in this to understand that you know at the end of the day you know it's easy for everybody to come in and say we're this conglomerate we're not liable we're not see we are held as a digital pub as publishers sprint legacy publishers we are held to the highest standards you know we have we are you know everybody monitoring us and we are you know responsible for a lot of things and every other platforms per se we'll just say listen we have nothing to do with this content we have nothing to do with how we place the content you know and they are not liable for any of these things so as a result anything can happen I mean case and point is we you know I remember when we had the character floods and you were talking about the character floods um you know nowhere in Google despite the fact that we were the first first ones to be you know where the largest where everything in the first two pages of floods are searched about you know no content from us was ever came out and so I remember calling the head of Google at that time Rajan was hitting Google at that time I said listen what are you doing because what is happening is there's so much of noise out there and you know content which is false going out there um that people are then our phone numbers are jammed our emails are jammed because people are calling you think is this a fact is this true and we say no it's you know and we're constantly correcting the notion so when you have this and when there is so it's so it's completely not controlled it's it's it's it's in a mess out there it's it's detrimental for the people in the country as well when this happens and if you don't take responsibility for it whereas we have to take responsibility for every little word nuanced as it is then it's you know it is a responsibility of a government to come in and take over and say listen there is there is a value to this product and it's important that this be protected because you know at the end of the day beamats can come in and kind of steam rule everything but is that what you want at the end of the day and government in not only Australia all over the world in America and in Europe is taking you know sitting up and kind of taking notice of this thing this is what is happening and we definitely expect the Indian government also to kind of you know take our side on this one I think we're okay we're okay with whatever you do but you know hold us in the same standards that's right don't hold us in different standards from someone else absolutely and I think very relevant points especially uh during covid times I remember during the peak of the lockdown and curfew news that would come from established known newspaper brand would be the only one believed because you know WhatsApp forwards and you know digital news it becomes so overwhelming and overpowering today and there's so much floating around that we finally all fell back on you know newspaper news to confirm whether you know something was true or not so I think if covid has grown one thing it is that genuine news and credibility of that has become even more valuable for customers and how the how the newspaper brands now you know kind of utilize that over the next few years as you said will determine whether we can make any subscription meaningful subscription revenues let me pick up another question it's an interesting one let me summarize it it's a long question you are into so many things you know the Malayali so well why not an e-commerce product uh investments there are huge um so we we again in the in the phase of experimenting we had actually signed up with the at that time one of the first few e-commerce people in kerala in india um india mart it was Dinesh Agrawal is a friend yes Dinesh Agrawal started india mart correct so um so we we kind of tied up with them and you know we thought he would go into e-commerce and it was one of the things that we did think about but uh frankly speaking uh the investments are quite a bit and we thought we'll first expand into the stuff that we know uh we we know content we still don't know we don't know e-commerce very well and we you know there's a lot of money involved and then we're a we're a safe company so we don't we're not ready to kind of put our foot there and say okay listen we're we're going to invest in this and then wait for all the money to come in and uh burn a lot of money which is just not our style first another question according to you if there is one big change that you would see in the future of online news consumption what would that be sorry what is the big change you would see in online news consumption going forward say two years out i think online news consumption will move more to uh video more to uh voice um that's what it's going to go into um long form news is going to be of interest to people i think people are already uh you know realizing that that's what is uh that that is something which they want different um it's basically we are more you know formed a multi-form report i think i just want to correct myself it was not india mark it was fab mark that we had signed up by the there's another question uh many media houses in india are family-driven manorama has been credited with running various media platforms within the group more as a corporate how is the next generation of the family looking at the business how is their involvement like so we're still very much professional driven we have professionals hitting most of our you know organizations i am an exception in that i have i am part of the family but i'm heading this business but in general we have i mean i have a very good team of professionals who are actually leading this in terms of content in terms of marketing and technology um the the next generation has also been very you know everybody's gone to get trained everywhere we work to another places before we come back here um and we truly believe that this is an organization which has to be run by professionals we cannot you know kind of let it be one of those uh where we sort of indulge in everything all our role is to kind of support and to kind of push uh the professionals who are working in practice speaking malala manorama is the hard work of the team members really has nothing to do with any of anybody else our next one while manorama is headquartered in a small town of kothayam it has created waves for being a frontrunner in many good practices including employee training education and also a healthy work life balance while maintaining market leadership how much of this can be attributed to being a small town bring big brand or a brand that values relationships stroke people over commerce we um i think it's come down to a generation that most important thing in in uh in this brand is relationships it's not employees we don't have really it's not that we have in fact one of the persons and we talk to people to join us is that you know we're not having a relationship only with them but with their entire family i mean we truly believe that um if if you are coming into our company it is not only you but it is your your spouse your children your parents they're all part of this manorama family and um and that's how we've tried to build in the culture which is which is the reason why we probably have you know a lot of our employees are third generation and fourth generation employees it's that connection that we've had over the past years and that's something which we really value it's very important for us it's it's really not like i said it for us it's not about if it was about the traffic or the revenue then there will be a lot of things that we would do differently it's for us it's about the journalism uh what we bring to the table that is what is more important for us absolutely legacy brands are built on values uh traffic and revenue is a by-product of that absolutely next question uh can you tell us a unique aspect of Malayalam readers that you've capitalized from a business point of view well that might be a trade secret but here's the question yeah um well i think Malayalam readers what i see is that if you can tell them that there is value in what you're giving then they're willing to accept it i think they're willing to try different things i think they're willing to accept value but you have to convince them it's not that easy you cannot just kind of say i'm giving you something because they're very particular about what they get and they definitely have very clear ideas of what they should get so you cannot give them just anything and get away with it um that way they are very finicky about it but uh if you can convince them then they are your supporters our next question uh from unikrishnan bk do you think digital platforms are getting its due share from the market in terms of ad revenues when compared to print tv or even radio no not yet uh it's very small fraction um but i think uh i think covid has changed in a little bit and the people have realized the kind of traction we're getting and uh interesting when interestingly when you know the peak of the lockdown we had some people who decided that you know local people uh retailers have decided they should try out uh digital and they found it uh that it made a lot of difference to them you know to do to do that so you know you never know it i covid may have may have been that point which is the inflection point which is now going to help the uh digital revenues again it cannot it's not going to be banners uh so it's it's really you know it has to be a lot more different from than banners we have to be more innovative about it and how to get the it it just cannot be payment and less stuff it has to be innovation i think if i were to add on another point to this there is part about you know digital not getting its sort of you know if you talk to a tv guy he might think that you know digital is being uh getting a larger share than deserved the other part of the equation is also whether vernacular is getting its fair share of revenue when it comes to digital as opposed to you know languages which are you know more mass in nature say a hindi or a english especially english is always punched up of its weights uh weight for natural reasons but i think uh vernacular news especially vernacular digital news as a you know as a lot of work to do in terms of going and convincing national advertiser to look at it very differently i think it's seen as a small piece uh add on monies are put in there and i think a lot of convincing and work is required to be done in that area because you know unlike in the past today uh in the regional space anybody who's reading a vernacular language has money to spend to buy those brands no absolutely and uh so for kera you know we can we also show the fact that you know the response which comes from vernacular sites is far better than the response which comes from uh you know national sites english language sites even facebook and google for that matter and we've done those experiments so we have those case studies to show how you know the response is far better in terms of the customer who's there and so i mean for us i mean uh when it comes to revenues it's 50 percent national 50 percent local so um i think people recognize that there's a lot more push it to be required i think you're right uh that actually this is not even uh this should be premium forget about the fact that you should be advertising that this should be premium advertisement because really the kind of response you get from vernacular you're not going to get from any other segment that's right uh we're out of time so let me just take two last questions uh one is kerala is no more malayalam centric do you see yourself catering to the english speaking malayali in kerala through digital yes so we have an english website it's for lawn manorama uh and we have uh we have now in the last few years got a significant traction of traffic for that understanding that that is that is uh that is a set of people who will want to be part of the malayalam ecosystem or kerala ecosystem so definitely we are we have english products which is already there and more on the pipeline and you also look at uh you know getting into other regions because you know unlike print where you have to set up elaborate teams and printing centers and offices digital can be done with you know smaller teams so are you also looking at expanding into other languages in the region in south india for instance so content so far we are not getting into but we are classified we are moving into other other languages so like i said informaries already launched into the other states um the other classified products we looking into um content not yet fantastic with that let me thank you mariam thank you for a very candid and honest chat and let me also tell you uh i spoke with a couple of friends before this conversation and the one overriding theme i got from them was this is a group that gets it when when it comes to digital so congratulations on earning that tag uh because that is that is a that is a tag very few media companies especially legacy media companies in india have earned uh thank you for being part of this for those of you listening thank you for being part of this on a friday evening i hope we made your time worthwhile uh before you go away just a reminder monday we have a chat in the evening under the exchange for media conclave series with the c of times now mk anand that's again at five o'clock you can check out our zoom links till then stay safe and enjoy your weekend thank you for joining us thank you thank you everyone