On Episode 5 of RePivot, a show focused on the business of news in India, Rohan Venkat and Jayant Sriram speak with Ritu Kapur, co-founder and CEO of The Quint, an award-winning digital news organisation that has carved out a unique voice in India’s media space.
The Quint is among a crop of digital-only news organisations that emerged in India in the mid-2010s, alongside others like Scroll.in and The News Minute, (whose founder, Vignesh Vellore, joined us on the RePivot podcast a few months ago).
'Super-alliances' and the fate of independent news in India with The News Minute's Vignesh Vellore
Unlike the pivot to reader revenue through membership or subscription models preferred by a number of those publications in recent years, The Quint continues to repose its hopes in the digital advertising market, having built out a brand studio alongside other streams of revenue like fact-checking and events.
Prior to co-founding The Quint, Kapur had spent years in the media business. She studied Film & TV Production from MCRC at Jamia Milia Islamia. She was among the founding members of Network18 in the early 1990s. She then built out the features programming at CNN-IBN when it launched in India, pioneering the use of citizen journalism at a mainstream outlet.
In 2014, after having sold Network18 to Reliance Industries, Kapur and her husband Raghav Bahl co-founded the Quint, publishing articles first just on Facebook and then building out a website that, according to the Financial Express, counted 10 million unique visitors in December 2016. This came alongside investments in several other platforms and publications, including Quintype – a CMS solution – and The News Minute, among others.
The Quint itself chose a youthful multimedia approach, covering a wide range of subjects, from news and politics to Bollywood and health, and building out verticles like Quint Hindi, Quint Neon and WebQoof, a fact-checking unit that has been certified by the International Fact-Checking Network. It was also early to experiment with creative efforts at digital advertising, partnering with Motorola to cover the Bihar 2015 elections using video shot on mobile phones.
After having more than 200 members on staff at one point, the website has become smaller in recent years, and trimmed some of its coverage. Today, according to SimilarWeb, thequint.com receives 6.3 million unique visitors monthly. Its co-founders have faced raids by the Income Tax department, as well as licensing difficulties in building out a business news website in partnership with Bloomberg, prompting them to eventually sell BloombergQuint to the Adani Group.
Over the course of the conversation, we spoke Ritu about:
The business-side thinking that went into the Quint originally when it was set up, first on Facebook and later as a separate website. Kapur talks of how, as was in vogue at the time, the idea was to amass an audience and expect revenues to follow.
A broader perspective on the digital news boom of the early 2010s and where things are headed. The Quint was part of a cohort of pure digital outlets that came up in India in the early part of the last decade, inspired by the waves made by organisations like BuzzFeed and The Huffington Post. As the outlook for the pure-play digital model has changed over the last few years, Kapur spoke about how the Quint has tried to adapt.
The early success with creative advertising solutions, like the Motorola project mentioned above. Kapur explained that these were misleading, saying that while early on they thought earlier broadcast formats – such as having a sponsor simply underwrite coverage without editorial interference – could be replicated digitally, overtime brands wanted to have a bigger say in the content.
The pivot away from social media distribution. Kapur spoke of how the website has had to adapt to algorithmic changes and weaned itself off of dependence on social media, except on the video front, where it is still heavily reliant on YouTube.
The move of other digital publications towards reader revenue and philanthropic grants, and why The Quint is ‘staying the course’ on a model that is reliant on advertising revenue.
The financial viability of the news product and the need to look at a media company as perhaps offering more. Much of the last year has been dominated by talk of ‘the bundle’ approach of The New York Time and others, where news only part of a larger more diverse product offering. We ended our discussion with reflections on the financial future of the news industry in India and around the world, and some hints as to the direction that the Quint may be taking next.
Listen to the episode for more insights on path The Quint has taken and where Ritu Kapur believes news media in India could go. If you have suggestions for who we should feature on the podcast or feedback, you can share your thoughts in the comments below or write to us at repivot@substack.com.
If you missed our previous episodes, check them out below:
Why the Quint is staying the course on advertising revenue, with Ritu Kapur