English media gets the most of print space advertisement pie

Soma Das
Posted: Saturday, Mar 22, 2008 at 2337 hrs IST
Updated: Friday, Mar 21, 2008 at 2359 hrs IST

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New Delhi, Mar 21: The English media, which accounts for only 15% of the total newspaper market and has at least seven times lesser readership than the Hindi media claims more than half the share of total advertising pie of the print space, according to an industry estimate prepared by brokerage firm, Motilal Oswal print media report. This can be attributed to much higher ad rates in the English media. The high ad rates stem from the perception that the purchasing power of the niche readership of English newspapers is much higher than that of Hindi newspaper readers. But the ad rates in vernacular and Hindi newspapers is expected to grow faster from here on due to rising focus of the advertisers toward rural areas and small towns for incremental demand growth.

Print media is a highly fragmented industry in India with more than 62,483 registered newspapers. Hindi newspapers comprise 40% of the market while English papers constitute only 15% of the market, according to the report. Vernacular newspapers fill up the remainder space that is 35% of the market.

For each copy of Hindi newspaper that is bought, around seven to nine people read it, the corresponding figure for English dailies range from only two to four. Hindi and vernacular newspapers boast of much higher readership as 17% of the literate population end up reading Hindi dailies compared to 2.7% reading English dailies, according to the report.

Despite the higher readership of vernacular and Hindi dailies, English newspapers account for more than 53% of the total newspaper advertising pie. The advertising rates of English newspapers are nine times the rates of Hindi and nearly 13 times the rates of vernacular newspapers. According to Smita Jha of PricewaterhouseCoopers, the steep difference in the share partially stems from the fact that most of the business newspapers (in which the ad rates are even higher than general English newspapers) have been mostly in English till now. Siddharth Mukherjee of Adex agrees, “Most of the marketers target the niche readers. Most of the high priced lifestyle products get advertised in the English newspapers”.

Mukherjee adds that the total ad pie was around Rs 63 billion in 2006 for all media put together. Of this total sum, around 90 to 95% of advertiser’s money penetrated to 50% of the total population while the other 50% population largely remained media dark. Most industry experts see this trend changing as recent ad rate increases for vernacular newspapers have been higher than that for the English newspapers (partially because ad rates in English newspapers are already very high, broadening the base figure on which growth is calculated). Industry experts expect this trend to not only continue but gain momentum in the future.

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