Advertising to #thenext300million in India

At India Internet Day, I interviewed Umang Bedi, formerly Head of Facebook South Asia and currently President of Dailyhunt on local language digital media. His views on what media offerings to construct and how to monetize I think could be useful for founders building new apps and services for the #next300million.

Key points that Umang made:

• India advertising spend is 65,000 crores ($10 billion) of which TV is $5.5 billion (5–6% CAGR), print $2.5 billion (2% CAGR), digital $2 billion (30% CAGR). Digital advertising will overtake TV in 5 years, at these growth rates.
• Dichotomy: On TV, 95% of ads & content is non-English, in print, 95% of content is non-english, on digital, 95% of content & ads are in English. Real gap which will flip over the next few years.
• What will it take to build defensible digital media assets in India, given dominance of Facebook/Google/etc.? Umang’s answer is here in this video. Opportunity for India digial media startups: operate where Google/Facebook are not dominant — they don’t understand hyperlocal; nor local language; nor non-ads business models. If you are banking on ads, build your own ad sales team, don’t rely on Google etc.
• Socio-economic class and language preference (for media consumption, communications) are *not* correlated. Local language does not mean lower socio-economic class.
• For digital media/social media properties, ARPU is $5/quarter ($20/year) in developed countries. India is about $4–5/year opportunity currently. TV is $5.5B ad spend on 800 million reach which is ~$7/year (grossly oversimplifying).

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