I-Com Global Summit: Analysing India's 130 million hindi news viewers

Pekham Basu, VP-strategy, BARC India, presented its case titled ‘Bio news’ that was shortlisted in the Data Creativity Awards category at the I-Com Global Summit 2019.

 

Giving a background of the television viewing scenario in India, Basu said, "India is the second largest TV viewers market in the world. Among the homes that have TVs, 98 per cent are single TV households. 130 million people watch hindi news channels every day. From the business perspective the news industry focusses on viewership. This is because majority of the news channels are free-to-air and 90 per cent of their revenue comes from advertising. There is a race among news channels to be number one every week, so much so that one channel had their number one position as breaking news on that channel."

 

She then explained the need of Bio News. "BARC was providing credible data. But then people were asking us where were they going wrong. So we created a tool – for insights customised for news editors. We created a cross functional team which gave agility and introduced new metrics for scientific bench marking. Alongside videos, we kept viewership graphs to ensure how viewership was changing. We made it available on laptops and mobiles. Complex analysis that took hours was given in ten minutes," said Basu.

 

She added, "A news broadcaster can get ROI for every story. We can also give out information like which channel broke the news first and which channel is on a commercial break. You can also get ROI for each anchor."

 

Basu then shared a couple of examples of Bio News analysed dips and growth of viewership numbers.

 

"One channel's viewership numbers dropped. When we analysed it, it was because it gave lesser coverage to the former chief minister of Tamil Nadu, Jayalalitha."

 

"During the coverage about Asaram Bapu's rape case verdict, all the channels were showing similar coverage, but one stood out. The reason for this was that the channel was the only one which gave the story of the guru’s ‘significant other’ (partner)."

 

Winners of the I-Com Data Creativity Awards will be announced later tonight.