Expect New Digital Initiatives From The India Today Group Over The Next Six Months

In an interview with exchange4media, Ashish Bagga, CEO Living Media Ltd (the India Today Group) confesses that they were a little too ahead of the curve with Newspapertoday.com, and it became too expensive to run. Given the low ROI as a free paper, they switched to a paid strategy which found no takers; eventually, they had to shut it down and follow a conservative strategy.
However, he feels that now the time is right and they have plans for both the Internet and mobile, some of which will be implemented within the next six months. Bagga says that they will address content from a user perspective, instead of leveraging their content online. They are also planning to launch an FM radio channel. Read the interview here.
Will they be doing something differently from what everyone else has done, so far? It’s easy to say it, a completely different scenario when you’re trying to do something innovative. Innovation, I’ve heard, comes from small teams, not large groups. I was at the Indian Magazine Conference for a few sessions yesterday (updates from that will be up shortly), and the magazine publishers didn’t seem too gung-ho about opportunities online, or worried about the digital space as possible threat.

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