Indian media critic Sevanti Ninan has an eye-opening piece about the boom in India's media sector. From IANS (via the SAJA Discussion List):
Among many upbeat estimates of how much media will grow in India is one from Group M, a Britain-based global media investment management company which released a new study earlier this month estimating that media investment in India will exceed $5 billion next year, and is growing at an annual compound average of 21 percent. The Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) estimated earlier this year that in another five years media and entertainment in India will be worth around $22 billion.
But it's the part further down that really astounded me. Although I have friends and former colleagues who have been poached by competing Indian media outlets, I had no idea just how high the stakes have gotten:
The news part of the media and entertainment sector is expanding massively too, without enough media professionals to go round. Each new entrant simply doubles salaries and takes away from the existing newspapers and TV channels. Salaries are shooting up, the skill pool is not expanding at the same rate. A newspaper editor who lost two talented senior journalists to the new channel bouquet INX admitted that he went up to offering Rs.300,000 a month to try to retain one of them but lost him nonetheless to the predator channel which offered Rs.600,000 a month.
That is an amazing and enticing amount of money, even for boomtime India (Rs. 600,000 = $15,000, at 40 rupees to the dollar). But Ninan raises some serious concerns about the news industry, starting with the fact that even novices can job-hop with ease:
Knowledge of a subject is not essential when all you have to do is to stick a mike in somebody's face and toss off an opinionated sentence to round off a piece to camera. Besides, TV enables someone from the backend of the studio to feed into your earpiece what questions to ask. News in India's media industry is increasingly defined as being what the news consumer is interested in. Show business and cricket top the list of newsroom priorities with disasters getting their passing due. So chances are today's newsgatherers are not taught how to read government or parliamentary reports or budget papers for stories. Entire sectors such as farming, labour, and school education go unreported.
Sounds familiar, doesn't it? But she says "the boom could turn out to be a bubble," due to the excessive number of channels.
In 2006, advertising expenditure was 23 percent higher than in 2005, but advertisers increasingly feel that the fragmented market is delivering less for their money. According to analysts using TAM (television audience measurement) figures, there are 324 channels today on which advertisers buy time compared to 210 four years back. Programmes which delivered television viewership ratings of 10+ are now down to a TVR of between 1 and 2. The share of the top five channels in the viewership pie has come down from 40 percent to 30 percent, and so on. So advertisers have refused to hike rates for some five years. If advertising is not delivering the same viewership as before, neither is it translating into revenues for broadcasters because of the stagnating rates.
Elsewhere, here's an article about the strong growth in the number of niche magazines in India. From Televisionpoint.com in Mumbai:
The magazines have been aided by the fact that 100 per cent foreign direct investment (FDI) is now allowed in special interest magazines, compared with 26 per cent in news and general interest publications. Recent entrants in the market include Conde Naste's fashion magazine Vogue, Dennis Publishing's Maxim targeted at young men (in collaboration with Media Transasia) and Emap's FHM.
More on two of the main players in the sector:
Next Gen Publishing, formed by Forbes Gokak group, HDFC and Emap alone has seven niche titles in its portfolio that include Bike India, Car India, Ideal Home & Garden. It recently launched men's magazine FHM. The company that started with an investment of Rs 1 lakh has grown to Rs 15 crore in authorized capital. On the other hand, Infomedia, 49 per cent of which is owned by Reed Business Infomedia, has 21 niche titles in all out of which seven titles cater to the business to consumer segment. These cover areas like automobile industry, gadgets, photography, IT, interiors and even a magazine called Disney Adventure for Kids.
