The DNPA Conclave and Awards 2024 has kicked off in Delhi, with a focus on the future of digital media in a time of AI-led transformation and the relationship between news publishers and Big Tech platforms.
The conclave opened with an address by Tanmay Maheshwari, Chairman, Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA) and Managing Director, Amar Ujala and a stimulating discussion featuring Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Minister of State, Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India. The minister spoke about how India plans to lead the global race by adopting a digital first approach. The conclave also included sessions by S Krishnan, Secretary, Meity and Anurag Thakur, Minister, Information and Broadcasting, Government of India.
One of the panel discussions that followed between industry professionals – Vikram Chandra, founder, Editorji, Clement Birdsall, sr. publisher and platform director, APAC at Publica by IAS, Sunil Sharma, chief product and technology officer, Network18 Media & Investments Ltd, Hemant Jain, president and business head (digital), Lokmat Media and Sunny Sen, founder and CEO, Conscent.ai, spoke about data usage, collection, third party data, revenue streams in the media landscape and more.
Digital and high impact advertising will move away from display and native editorial to completely morphing into audience-based selling or buying. News publishers are going to start investing heavily into collecting first party data becomes extremely important because a human being charging significant premium basis data intelligence becomes justified.
“I don’t think we’re going to lose traffic. What we’re going to lose out on is advertising revenue because we won’t be able to justify where the advertisers money is going,” said Sharma. From a monetisation perspective, advertisers will pay a lot more than what news media will be able to sell.
For this, tracking and collecting user data is essential. The core of the media business is establishing the relationship between content and the user, be it ad revenue, subscription revenue, content to commerce, event IPs, etc. It all revolves around this relationship said Sen.
User experience and programmatic advertising are going to play a significant role In shaping revenue models in the future. Audiences are focusing more on the experience the product or service provides. Thus, an evolution will be seen across industries including the media landscape where focus shifts to UX.
This is where data collection comes in. Collecting user data now becomes paramount as understating what the user wants and how the user is reacting is important to shape the offering.
There is a large possibility of non-fungible tokens (NFT) picking up drastically and bring viewed as an alternative source of revenue. The originality of content creation is here to stay.
‘It all boils down to building a relationship with the user. If you can build a relationship with the user, a number of revenue options automatically become available,” added Sen.