How is Mint doing?”
For much of this past year, I would typically respond to this oft-asked question by saying: “You tell me.”
After all, it mattered less what we at Mint believed how we were doing than what our consumers—readers and advertisers—thought how we were delivering on our early promises.
But as Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and our first anniversary today seems as good a time as any to pause and reflect.
We launched a year ago saying Mint will try and fill three clearly stated needs:
•The need for authoritative, credible, and timely news and analysis affecting business and finance, primarily in India.
• The need to save you time, through careful selection of essentials, to spare you from wading through torrents of unevaluated words each day.
• And critically, the need for trustworthiness. Webelieve that the only information that is useful is information that is accurate and unbiased.
We said our Views will be distinct from our News and that, as an institution, we will proudly stand for the power of free markets and clear ideas to transform India and free its people from poverty and ignorance. And, in all this, we said we will serve as an unbiased and clear-minded chronicler of the Indian Dream.
A year later, we feel pretty good about the values based on which we try to publish Mint every day. And our belief that we are on the right path has been validated by our growing reach—at last count, 119,698 copies every day, of which 89,495 go to individual annual subscribers—in the three cities that we publish from, having added Bangalore to our initial New Delhi and Mumbai editions. Our website (www.livemint.com) has had at least 10.5 million page views in January alone. As a result, in terms of our readership, Mint has been the fastest growing business news brand in India, and we thank all of you for your faith in this start-up and your support for its kind of journalism.
In terms of advertising, we began with almost no advertising, as is perhaps the norm for a start-up newspaper. We remained constrained by the fact that new newspapers in India can’t easily get into widely accepted third-party counts—of readership and circulation numbers—until they have been around for at least a year, a legacy of rules that try to create moats around established players. And yet, we are pleased that paid advertising accounts for about 12-15% of our total space on any given day. We see it climbing steadily to around 25% of total space available as we continue to attract relevant readers that advertisers will want to reach through Mint.
If you are wondering why an editor of a paper is concerned about these business matters, it is simply because a typical reader is asked to pay only Rs2 for a copy of a newspaper that costs much more to produce—Mint costs about Rs7; I am talking of just ink and paper costs. So, the better Mint does on the ad front, the more resources I will have to spend on bringing quality journalism to you.