Zee Digital now operates more like a tech start-up: Rohit Chadda

From June 2019 until now Zee Digital has witnessed a 123% increase in traffic. They accomplished their first milestone in September last year by crossing 100 million unique monthly visitors. There has been no stopping the team ever since.

In a chat with e4m, Rohit Chadda, CEO of Digital Publishing at Zee Group, talks about how digital saw a major boost during the lockdown and how the trend seems to sustain itself even as businesses start to open up. Talking about his plans for the group’s future in digital he said they work on four pillars that include-hyperlocal, social, content-based commerce and user-generated content.

Excerpts:

You mentioned Zee Digital jumping to the 2nd spot in 2020 in ComScore ranking. What do you credit this to?

I attribute our success to a combination of a change of culture as well as process. With regards to culture, Zee Digital now operates more like a tech start-up. Start-ups are known for their speed, agility and data-driven approach to problem solving. Rather than trying to implement big projects, we do a lot of small experiments and track their results to know what’s working and what’s not. This iterative process helps us learn and change paths if required very early on in the lifecycle of any project.

Further, with regards to process, we’ve taken a data and technology driven approach to content. Rather than pushing our content to the users, we started listening to the users and understanding their preferences to produce relevant content that they are looking for.

The long lockdown has given digital a major boost. What is the kind of growth that Zee Digital witnessed?

Zee Digital has seen a phenomenal growth during the lockdown. In March 2020, we crossed 150 million unique monthly visitors, moving to the 4th position in Comscore among digital media groups. Further in May 2020 we crossed 185 million unique monthly visitors and moved to the 3rd position before finally moving to the 2nd spot in June 2020 in the ComScore rankings among all digital media groups in India.

Furthermore, June 2020 onwards, we also feature in the top 10 digital companies in India as per the ComScore Ranking.

With life and business slowly coming back to normal do you see the numbers falling. How do you plan to make the achieved growth sustainable?

After the end of the lockdown, all content consumption has reduced from where it used to be during the lockdown. However, the new levels are still much above pre-lockdown levels thus showing an overall increase in adoption of digital content. Additionally, even though user numbers have reduced but there is an increase in CPMs and hence revenues since advertisers have started spending again. This revenue growth has more than made up for the decrease in users.

There has been a lot of focus on languages and videos on digital — what is your take on this and what is Zee doing in that front?

The next few years in the digital content space are going to be about the 3Vs - Video, Vernacular (Languages) and Voice and that’s what our focus has been for the past year as well. With India being a land of diverse traditions and cultures, it becomes important to cater to every region differently and in their own native language. We launched 3 new languages in the past one year - Odia, Punjabi and Urdu - in the digital space to penetrate these markets in depth. Further, during the lockdown we also launched OTT apps for some of our brands to capitalise on the adoption of OTT during the lockdown. As a result, we’ve seen a very strong growth from Video and Vernacular both and intend to continue to focus on the same in the near future.

What is the next big thing we would be seeing from Zee in the digital space?

The first decade of the internet in India (2000-2010) was all about content while the second decade (2010-2020) saw the growth of commerce. The next decade will be about content again but given the rapidly changing user behaviour, the ‘what to consume’ and ‘how to consume’ will continue to evolve. In an endeavour to cater to the evolving needs of users, we plan to build the future of Zee Digital on the four pillars of hyperlocal, social, content-based commerce and user-generated content.