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Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd’s Newsmedia Group owns coveted mindshare
in Mumbai. Consider: 27% of the English readership in the
city reads Mid Day and Sunday Mid Day. 7% of Gujarati readers
read Gujarati Mid Day. And our 64-year-old Urdu daily Inquilab
`owns’ 63% of all Urdu readers!
Metro, our latest media product, is a community free-sheet.
It will cover 12 significant areas of Mumbai by March 2003.
It has begun to add significantly to the Group’s reach and
revenue.
The Newsmedia Group operates in an extremely challenging environment.
Print advertising accounts for 48% of the total marketplace,
but ad spend is growing at 4-5%, implying that the print media’s
share of the overall pie is coming under pressure.
How do we as a company plan to maintain trajectory in the
face of this reality? We are attacking the market on several
fronts:
increasing readership
going after a higher-profile readership
using convergence to sweat assets and knowledge base
Convergence will drive the Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd agenda over the coming years.
A huge knowledge repository will feed the growing media branches - the 4 newspapers,
the city portal, radio, wireless platforms, and land-line phones.
Growth in the Newsmedia Group is expected to be fuelled by our forays into
the community free-sheets. They will add significantly to the number of ‘newsers’
serviced by Mid-Day Multimedia Ltd.
Like most on-the-ball media companies, Mid Day too invested
significantly in the Web space. It created a distinct property
in Chalomumbai.com, making it one of the best city portals in
the country.
Post the unrealistic market euphoria, however, we have reined in our dotcom
investments, and we are now watching this space very carefully. We continue
to believe that this medium has tremendous potential in the longer run and
are committed to it.
In the interests of a group identity, Chalomumbai.com has reverted
to Mid-day.com. This is a representation of the newspaper on
the Web, embellished with all the requisite interactive tools
to enhance user experience. With our unparalleled coverage of
city news, entertainment and sport, we attempt to bring Mumbai
to the Mumbaikars all over the world. And we do so in real-time. |
