‘TV9 Network’s journey is about complete disruption’

  • MD and CEO Barun Das speaks about the three pillars that helped TV9 Network to go from a net loss of 55 crore in FY20 to a net profit of 76 crore in FY23

Gaurav Laghate
Published22 Aug 2023, 11:40 PM IST
TV9 Network MD and CEO Barun Das
TV9 Network MD and CEO Barun Das

Barun Das, who joined the TV9 Network in August 2019 as its CEO, has turned around a small, loss-making news network, into a profitable venture with both TV and digital operations. Das, who previously worked with Zee News, India Today and ABP in various managerial positions in the past, said his mandate was to make TV9 Network one of the leading news networks in India. In an exclusive interview with Mint, he spoke about the three pillars—content, distribution and marketing—which helped to go from a net loss of 55 crore in FY20 to a net profit of 76 crore in FY23. Edited excerpts…

You will complete four years as TV9 Network CEO this week. How will you describe the journey of turnaround so far?

Hindi news channel TV9 Bharatvarsha was launched in March and I joined in August of that year. Because of the launch-related expenses, we had an Ebitda loss of 44 crore and a net loss of 55 crore in FY20. But since then, if you look year on year, our topline grew 40% in FY21, 50% in FY22 and 16% in FY23. While almost everybody in the news industry grew in FY22, because they were growing on the covid slump, for us, it was different because we grew on a 40% growth over the previous year. FY23, if you check the listed players, have either remained stagnant or have seen a drop.

Now coming to the bottom line, I started at a net loss of 55 crore in FY20, the next year FY21 we broke even, FY22 we had a PAT of about 50 crore and in FY23, we ended with a PAT of 76 crore. Again, if you compare with the listed news companies, they have witnessed a significant drop, ranging from 30% to 70%. So this is the journey, now you need to decide whether you call it a complete turnaround or you call it a disruption.

In terms of revenues, where do you stack up with your competition?

Last year, we closed at about 635 crore, and this year, we will be closing anything between 750 crore and 800 crore, because this will also be an election year. Last year we emerged amongst the top three, I would tend to think that other than News18 and India Today, the rest of the news networks were lower than us. Though the other companies, that might be close to us are unlisted. In the current year FY24, we will be a strong top three player.

But more importantly, if you compare us with the other leading networks, we were the only ones who were expanding. Not only that we had a new Hindi channel, but we also had a Bengali channel launch, and then we had a complete revamp of our digital organization during that covid slump when everybody else was taking a salary cut or was doing retrenchments. But, during the same year, we recruited close to 1,000 people and built up a digital team. We also have increments in the month of September with retrospective effect, starting from April.

And what about viewership?

As far as the overall business is concerned, we have I think an undisputed leadership in terms of viewership for broadcast. We are at about 240 million AMAs (average minute audience in '000) every week and the next player would be sub 200 million. So, there is a huge gap. We are also catching up in the digital domain, where also I think our growth in topline has been exponential—far bigger than the percentages that we had set—because we are starting from a small base. And while we are catching up in the traditional term, we have ventured out into two new things which are pure-play experimentations and which have just to keep us future-ready.

You became the lead sponsor of an IPL team. A very unorthodox move for a news network?

Prior to 2020, if you would have asked people in North India about TV9, they would not have known. Nobody knew that a brand like TV9 existed. So with the relaunch in March 2020, we backed it up with solid marketing. We took the jerseys of Rajasthan Royals during covid because we realized that brand salience is important and that paid dividends. So we took that two consecutive years and then we had always been investing back in the brand. Even now if you travel from Delhi or Mumbai you will see all the televisions running TV9 Bharatvarsh.

So it’s content, which is finding out a nice need gap, which for us is a focus on international content and fantastic packaging and treatment backed by distribution upliftment. There are three pillars for building your ratings - one is your content, the second is distribution third is marketing. There’s no fourth one. All three were coordinated and executed with precision and efficiency and therefore we kept growing.

News is considered the watchdog or fourth pillar of democracy. Is it difficult to maintain the balance between editorial and business interests?

There is a very fine line that we have to draw—the news is a business or news is a fourth pillar. It’s a very fine line and it’s a very difficult line to trade around. Obviously, in today’s time, I believe that creativity or anything, unless and until it is self-sustaining, will not last. Even if you’re a brilliant artist, unless and until it is commercially viable, you won’t be able to sustain it you won’t be able to live through. So that is another thing that we keep consciously in our mind and I believe that how I have overcome this predicament is that I don’t think that anything would stand the challenge of time, unless and until you stay very true to your identity. So we maintain that identity of that being a fourth pillar. Having kept it in place, we build the business around it. That is the only way to go for it. So that is a very fine balance and how we look at the entire business.

There have been allegations about TV9 Bharatvarsh manipulating ratings and about TV9 Marathi being an extortionist channel. How do you respond to those?

Before I came on board, there were two very strong brands TV9 Telugu and Kannada. And then you had an embarrassment called TV9 Marathi which was known to be an extortion channel in Maharashtra and there was a Gujarati channel and News9. This was TV9. Then Bharatvarsh was launched followed by Bangla and we eventually became the number one news network.

Now, Bharatvarsh’s story is such that as we were planning to relaunch that channel, we reworked FPC, and for the first time I got involved in content. So I can say that I was driving the complete FPC and then the entire graphics, look and feel everything was changed. And we were ready for relaunch once we get the logo permission. At that time, we blocked ad spots on small regional channels in the Hindi-speaking markets with a humongous amount of FCT. My brief to the team was that if somebody is switching any channel in MP or UP, they should be exposed to an advertisement for TV9 Bharatvarsh. We got some of those spots for as low as 20 for 10 seconds because nobody else was buying. We blocked all of that and were ready for the relaunch by January 2020. That is where Providence helped us a little bit, we didn’t get the permission of logo change, we got the permission of logo change on the 15th of March 2020 and on the 23rd the country went into a lockdown.

So we relaunched on the 15th of March, we had a swanky, new refurbished, brilliant-looking channel with a content strategy in place and we had advertising running in these smaller regional channels. All this put together, what would have taken us maybe 12-18 months, had taken us two months. So that was an exceptional scenario. And then we were the first one to target China. And slowly we realized that there was a vacant spot where a Hindi-speaking global channel was not there. And because of your internet penetration, the world is at your fingertips even for the Hindi-speaking market. So that paid rich dividends. Then we got another impetus when the ratings resumption happened. Ratings for the news genre were supposed to resume with the UP election results. But, we were the only ones, along with Western media, we were harping on this Russia-Ukraine war and we had sent our reporter there. And then the week when the ratings resumed, the war became much bigger, bigger than the UP elections and we emerged as number one. So this was the second one, which had given us that shot in the arm.

But when we were growing, the entire industry came together saying that we were manipulating ratings. As you know, at that point in time, BARC did a detailed survey to figure out which BARC meters TV9 tampered with. And they came back and told the complainants that until and unless Barun Das has put a bug in every meter in the HSM, this is not possible. But if anyone asks me, I can tell them how we became number one.

Every market is different. TV9 Marathi is an opinion former today. That is like the gold standard in marketing—from being known to being an extortionist channel. That success story is no less than TV9 Bharatvarsh, where we were starting from ground zero. Here, we were starting from negative. So overcoming a negative identity and bringing it to the positive domain and not only positive it’s like making it like an institution there call for a huge credit.

Do you think that the news genre as a whole is suffering because of infighting? Again, the whole issue of ratings is coming up with some big players wanting to suspend weekly ratings.

I think it’s a fiercely competitive genre and when you have such competition, sometimes you overlook the collective benefit. You go for recency, you go for immediacy. But if you ask me as far as the rating is concerned, I’ve been very consistent. Unlike many players who only complain about ratings when their pecking order goes down, I’ve said that in the absence of anything better, we all stand to gain if the ratings don’t get stalled, because the moment ratings are stalled, the advertisers will have to play blind. And if they have to put money on me, how will they justify their spends or investments in the news genre? So this becomes not a coveted genre anymore. At this point in time, in the absence of anything better, I think we as a genre stand to lose significantly if the rating is stalled.

Coming back to your broadcast channels, do you cover the entire market?

You can divide India’s regional markets into three broad categories. One is HSM or Hindi-speaking markets, where the viability of a regional channel is a little challenging because there are two differentiators when it comes to regional channels—one is the content, which is local content, and the other one is language. So, obviously, the HSM missed out on that language differentiator. So therefore their viewership is also very comparable with the National channels in that market viewership. Then you have the large language differentiated markets, where you have six languages, Marathi, Bangla, and the four southern languages. And out of that, I think Malayalam is still not that big a market as far as news is concerned. So we are there in four large language-differentiated markets which are Bengali, Marathi, Kannada, and Telugu. We were contemplating our expansion in Tamil, but then we thought that no, if we have to go we’ll go the way we’ve gone for English. We also have a Gujarati channel because of its strategic importance and that’s one of the legacy brands. It’s a small market. When I came on board, there was also a Bengaluru-based English news channel News9. I don’t think India will ever be ready for a city-based English channel in terms of business viability, so we shut it down. And then we launched News9 in the digital format instead of coming up with a national traditional linear TV channel, which, according to me, never made sense.

How are your TV and digital businesses growing?

Our TV business has grown by 15% and digital revenue by 33% in the last fiscal. I believe eventually everything will move to Smart TVs or smartphones, and we are seeing the signs in the English news genre. But the Hindi and regional will take time and for another maybe 7-10 years, having linear channels in these languages will make business sense.

But we are also getting future-ready. One of our experiments in that sense is News9 Media Verse, which is the future of audiovisual news media. With this, we are not only keeping our future protected but also fostering a dream of expansion worldwide.

India still lacks that voice, which can drive our country’s narrative in the world arena, unlike many developed and developing countries. So we realized that without English you’re not seen very seriously in the corridors of power and decision-making. However, launching an English channel is very regressive because that is anyway an exponentially shrinking pie both in terms of viewership and revenue. And more importantly, we are looking at a footprint beyond our geographical boundaries. So TV9 would be a brand which is Indian in the regional languages penetrating deep into it, while News9 will be an English and international brand. And we are not going traditional TV with it. There are two aspects - one is the OTT News Nine Plus, which is complemented by News Nine Live, which is the 24-hour streaming service. In terms of content, we do not have newscasters or an anchor. It’s more conversational, it is more analytic, more deep diving, but it’s very conversational.

But is there a potential to have a subscription-led OTT in the news genre?

My perspective is that the OTT as an industry, not just news, has played it completely wrong with respect to their pricing, because of which, nobody is seeing the path to profitability in OTT. There’s something gone wrong already. On top of it, if you see news, it is obviously a big question mark, because historically, Indians have never been known to pay for the consumption of news. We even subsidize our newspaper by about 80%. But I feel that for an English audience if they can utilize that news, paying a subscription fee is not that big of a challenge anymore. I think the English audience is prepared to pay in India, which you can see on many of these websites, they’ve already been paid, and they’ve got tractions. So it depends on how much quality of content you get, and then ease of payment. And to answer your question, we are thinking of a hybrid model, where we will be advertising also for people who do not want to pay. And we would give them the option to upgrade themselves to a premium model where they won’t see advertising. But at the same time, I would like to say that even advertising in the digital domain will have to undergo metamorphosis.

We’re trying to convert advertising into content, where it will be brand stories, and we would make it engrossing enough, and we would try to see a shift in the viewing pattern where people are not waiting for advertising to get over or skip it. Rather, they are enjoying their advertising communication. So that is the experimentation which is on the table at this point in time. We are seeing some early success and I think that’s the future. Mind you, it is not really branded content or product placement. What I’m talking about is brand stories, which are one level higher. The mix of it for English audiences is a viable proposition at this point in time.

I was tempted to price the app at 500 per month, which we are still working on. But if I priced it at 500 bucks, and tomorrow, a legacy brand comes up and keeps it free or prices their service at 50, the entire model falls on its face. So collectively, either we survive, or we die, which is what was happening to the news genre some time back, which is what I think happening with the OTT genre and the entertainment place also, which is what will happen here. Singularly I cannot be changing the industry as a whole. So therefore it is wait and watch but we are keeping all options open. If I cannot garner my required revenue to P&L through a subscription model, I’ll have a fallback of advertising. So overall, it’ll be viable.

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First Published:22 Aug 2023, 11:40 PM IST
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