Zee Digital crosses 300 million Monthly Active Users in two years
May 28, 2021
New Delhi [India], May 28 : Talking about the achievement Zee Digital CEO Rohit Chadda said that our entire effort has been focused towards catering to the 450+ million news, entertainment internet audience in India and the results are here for all to see.
Analytics or creative ideation? What helped you reach the goal of 300 million users for Zee Digital in such a short time span?
It's a great feat to achieve 4x growth in MAUs in just 2 years and crossing 300 million aggregate MAUs for the network. Analytics and creative ideation have to go hand in hand to achieve the kind of growth that we have. During the past couple of years, our entire effort has been focused on catering to the 450+ million news & entertainment internet audience in India and the results are here for all to see.
During the US presidential elections, we did a first of its kind digital-first global launch of our international news channel WION making it available on 4 billion connected devices globally. The brand received tremendous response in the global markets and has seen 90% growth in users over the past 6 months.
With a tech and data-first approach to content, we've worked on the digital transformation of all functions to become a digital-first organization.
Which strategy works best when it comes to luring readers to your platform?
Mobile contributes to 95 per cent of our users hence our entire product roadmap is focused on mobile first to ensure the best experience on mobile devices. We launched native mobile apps for 5 of our major brands - India.com, Zee Hindustan, 24 Ghanta, Zee Business and 24 Taas. At the same time, performance and user experience improvements in the updates of existing WION and Zee News mobile apps helped them become the highest-rated news apps in the World and in India respectively with user ratings of 4.9 and 4.7, respectively on Google Play store.
Zee Digital did the largest PWA (Progressive Web App) launch for 13 of our national and regional news brands covering 9 languages to offer seamless news consumption experience on mobile web to cater to low-end smartphone users and users in low bandwidth areas.
The future of digital content lies in 3Vs - Video, Vernacular (Languages) and Voice and that's what our focus has been. Bringing videos to the forefront on the product along with setting up a strong video infrastructure helped us grow from 200 million video views in FY19 to over 2.5 billion video views in FY21.
How lockdown helped in booming the digital platforms of Zee?
The lockdown resulted in an increase in content consumption across brands. It was the same for us. However, the difference between ZEE and other competitors is that while we have sustained our user growth even after the lockdown was over, most competitors went back to pre-lockdown numbers. In fact, during the lockdown ZEE Digital became the second-largest digital media group in the country.
Which genre is being loved by the users the most - health, business, finance, bollywood or regional?
The Future of digital growth is regional. Vernacular content has been a strong focus area for us, and we shall continue to focus on it. In the past couple of years, we have launched 8 regional brands and 3 new regional languages - Odia, Punjabi and Urdu on digital to penetrate these markets in depth.
What all new initiatives we will be seeing from Zee Digital in 2021-22?
We plan to continue our strong focus on vernacular languages in India. We've launched digital only news brands in Telegu, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada. Further, India.com, BGR, Bollywood Life and The Health Site shall also see introduction of more languages. Additionally, Zee News, India.com and DNA shall extend their digital news coverage to key international markets which shall further boost our international revenues.
