Adgully Exclusive | On a digital ride with Bhaskar's content: I Media Corp's Gyan Gupta

Gyan Gupta, the Chief of the digital business of Dainik Bhaskar, IMCL (I media corp Ltd) is a result oriented professional with more than a decades experience in the Digital domain, adept at handling multiple roles from leading Business Development teams to Marketing/ Pre-Sales, Delivery and Operations. Gupta started his career with CMC Ltd. as a senior engineer and joined Dainik Bhaskar Group in November 2008.

In a very span of 2.5 years, he made dainikbhaskar.com one the largest Hindi portal in the country and the business and reputation of IMCL grew beyond the teams imagination.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Gupta shared his experiences with IMCL and gave us insights about his plans ahead.

Being the boss of the digital division , the two key decisions Gupta has taken in his role at the group is, treating ".com' as separately and recognizing that this is a medium with different needs and expectations. Hence, they aimed to make this different and not like the rest. The next was, leveraging the scale of Bhaskar and yet not get colored by it. So, they came up with an idea to establish the online brand on the merits or print yet with its own identity.

On asking about his achievements, he said, "In the current role as the head for the digital business for Dainik Bhaskar, I have been able to create the largest Hindi site dainikbhaskar.com and Gujarati site divyabhaskar.com the largest site in less than 2.5 years, while the other players have been in the segment for more than a decade. Not only is this dainikbhaskar.com the 3rd largest news portal, which makes us the fastest growing new site, in the previous role with GE, I have created a sizable digital content business for GE and established that as a new business line."

As dainikbhaskar.com account would now be handled by Noshe group,who will be focussing on strengthening the brand.On asking about the account handed to Noshe Gupta explained the reason for the same, "We had worked extensively on the product since last 2 year. And now we thought it is the right time to focus on making the people aware about our products and offerings. Hence we thought that we now need an agency to help us with this."

Currently there are three main challenges that Dainikbhaskar.com is dealing which are- Content Generation: There are not as many people generating or creating content in local languages, because they think that demand is not there. I think there is demand but there is not enough content there.

Content search ability: The current search engine can't index and search local language content. The larger internet technology is not fully optimized to work with Indian local languages. For example, Google can't index and search Indian language content and hence, there are not as many people.

Content monetization: Now that the market has started recognizing the quality of content and audience on these sites. So, now the advertising should pick up.

Gupta added, "Internally, I think we work continuously to establish the differentiation between print and online. Because these are two different medium with two different needs and hence should be treated separately. And we need to learn from the mistakes that west has made. And that's the reason why top successful internet companies are mostly technology and not content/ media."

Dainikbhaskar.com has been the fastest growing content site in the country and has grown more than 150% over last one year and expecting a better growth in the future.

About 2012 plan, Gupta said, "Will focus on strengthening our position as leader, and engaging our readers. I think this year we would be launching few new properties aimed at addressing the user's different needs and engaging them. Dainikbhaskar.com has been one of the first few companies to role out such a product."

Going forward dainikbhaskar.com would be focusing on smaller markets since internet penetration is increasing fastest in the tier II towns and this would fuel the need for the vernacular content, as these people would need more content in local languages.

"Dainik bhaskar has a huge brand presence in these markets and hence we are very well positioned to address this need. Also we have invested heavily in creation of original content for the web, and today significant part of the content is created only for web." Concluded, Gupta.