"Our goal is to be the best platform for publishers..."

"Almost 40 brands working across 10 languages, reaching about a quarter of a billion people every month, driving 20 billion page views every month, with almost 20 billion minutes spent, we've grown over 5X in the last 5-6 years, we touch half the internet on a monthly basis, and drive about 20 per cent of the content that's consumed..."

That is how Gulshan Verma, chief revenue officer, Times Internet, described the company, in numbers, at Digipub World.

Gulshan VermaVerma shared an insight about what publishers tend to, and ought to, think about whey ponder over what people do online: Often, people talk about the "search graph" and try to understand what consumers are searching for online. About three to four years ago, people started thinking about the "social graph", about how people are connected to one another, to brands, and to websites online, through LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

"But a vast majority of (online) time is actually spent on the things you love and are passionate about - your favourite sports, songs, eating out... where we see a very strong future for ourselves is this 'interest graph'; we want to make sure we represent the interests of all these consumers going forward. That's our strategy," he said.

"We know what phone reviews you look at, what house you're looking for, how much time you spend following your team (sports), which Bollywood reviews you're thinking about - that's a powerful tool for publishers to have," Verma added, going on to mention, at this point, the company's technology-based platform Colombia, an audience network.

In this context, he added, "Our goal here is to be the best platform for publishers to acquire, engage and monetise their audiences, in partnership." It helps that the team has "almost 1,000 data points per user right now, across over 200 million users."