"We don't compete with NDTV.com; we keep our focus on our product": Dainik Bhaskar's Gyan Gupta on his dot com

Recently, bhaskar.com (Dainik Bhaskar's website) was ranked as the No.2 website in the comScore report following The Times of India which is at No.1 position. According to the press release, bhaskar.com has 24.3 million unique visitors (people coming to site) and 378 million page views (the pages people read) till the month of March 31, 2016.

afaqs! had a quick chat with Gyan Gupta, chief executive officer, DB Digital.

Edited Excerpts:

Edited Excerpts

There has been a sharp spurt in the number of unique visitors to http://www.bhaskar.com/ in March. What could be the reason for that?

March has been a great month for us when we implemented several product changes to enhance the user experience. If you visit the bhaskar.com site from mobile, you will know what I am talking about. I think it's largely about giving the user a great experience coupled with extraordinary content.

You are marginally ahead of NDTV. Will you be able to maintain the lead and remain at No. 2? How do you plan to do that?

We really don't compete with them, and we keep our focus on our product -- content experience and product experience. The increase of Hindi usage would also add to the factor.

What is the major difference in the type of traffic for news sites in Hindi versus English? Is there a greater skew towards mobile access in the case of Hindi news sites?

I think mobile is the way most of India would access the internet. I don't think there will be too much of a difference, but even if it does exist, it will diminish over the next few quarters.

If the main Hindi site has been doing well, how different has been the experience of Divya Bhaskar and Divya Marathi online -- in terms of content consumed, or in any other way?

Divya Bhaskar has been a leader in the Gujarati space for a while. It's ahead of the nearest competitor by multiples. We apply the same learning and product experience to it as well.

Monetisation continues to be challenging online. What major initiatives are you taking? Do you marry online with any offline initiatives?

Monetisation is always a factor of scale. Over the next few years, as the internet grows, digital will reach more people than print will, and as many people as broadcast will. That's when advertisers will park similar budgets on digital.

We run the digital and print businesses separately and don't marry the two. These two businesses are separate and have to be treated and run separately.

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