The company’s flagship brand is The Indian Express (a national daily), and other major publications such as The Financial Express (a business daily), Loksatta (a Marathi daily) and Jansatta (a Hindi daily) make up some of its biggest subsidiary offerings.

Shyamal Datta, the Principal Product Manager of Indian Express, joined WAN-IFRA’s recent Digital Media India (Virtual) Conference 2022 to talk about the challenges and learnings from its newly-launched subscription business.

Indian Express is one of the six leading publishers that are part of the Digital News Innovative Programme – Subscription Bootcamp, offered by WAN-IFRA and supported by Meta Journalism Project, India. 
Indian Express’ subscription journey
The Indian Express put its ePaper – its only paid product then – behind a paywall in December 2019, just three months before the COVID lockdown began.

Consequently, advertising revenue and print circulation took a hit. The company spent April and May 2020 putting its resources and energies into experimenting on how to strengthen and expand its subscription offering.

From March-May 2020, the brand removed the ePaper from behind the paywall and reintroduced it towards the end of May after carrying out a few pricing experiments to cater to multiple audience segments and user needs. 

The company continued its experiments in the following 6-7 months and launched a metered paywall on The Indian Express Digital in August 2021. In January 2022, the brand launch…