Last year Mint had carried an article about magazines in India planning on Indian language editions in order to increase their reach. Kind of late in publishing the summary of that article [Niche English magazines plan vernacular editions – no longer available on livemint.com] but better late than never,
- Magazines Hello!, Lonely Planet, Better Photography and Femina plan to publish in Indian languages.
- Languages give these magazines to reach a ‘larger audience’ and gives quality upmarket platform to advertisers.
- A bulk of India’s economic growth is coming from smaller towns and cities which are not very comfortable with English.
- Advertisers are looking beyond metros, hence they are forced to embrace language platforms.
- Smaller town residents buy automobiles & travel, after all they have the spending power which very few urban residents realize. The best way for these niche magazines to reach them is to have the language version of their magazine.
- India had 73,000 magazines (in 2011, source Office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India).
- Language pie of magazines: 34% (24,820) in Hindi , 53% (38,690) in other regional languages.
- English publications account for 13% (9,490) of the 73,000 magazines.
- 300 niche magazines have been launched in India between 2006 and 2011.
- Magazines attract Rs 1,200 crore ($212 million as of August 2012) in advertising every year with 35% of this going to Hindi and regional language magazines (this is low, it should have been above 70%).
- Niche English magazines ad revenue is approximately Rs 2,000 crore ($36 million as of August 2012).
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