When a billion users don’t think as one audience

[00:00:00] Nandagopal Rajan: Being content led, I think all websites are content led in that sense. But being content led also means that you think content first, right? It’s always journalism first. It shouldn’t be that like we used to have the saying long back in the newsroom that good journalism cannot die on the altar of good design.

[00:00:14] We can’t be compromising because of technology. We can’t be compromising because of product, right? The journalism always has to shine through. And it’s not easy, right? Because there are a lot of things that you have to do because you have to stay relevant. Let’s look at the platform phase. I think we are at the other end of the platform phase now.

[00:00:32] Maybe AI tends to– ends up becoming a new platform phase altogether. But we are at the end of that. We all cater to, okay, what do you need to do for the Facebook market? What do you need to do for the Google market? Even in that phase, we were always like, “We’ll not compromise on the content.” Maybe we will push the envelope a little bit on what we can do.

[00:00:47] And that, I think, in hindsight, has worked for us because while others were chasing traffic, we ended up getting the

[00:00:59] Jason Hemingway: readers

[00:01:00] Welcome to In Other Words, the podcast from Phrase, where we speak with leaders shaping how global businesses grow, scale and operate. Today’s guest is Nandagopal Rajan, CEO of Indian Express Digital. Over the past decade, Nandagopal has helped transform a 30-person digital team into a business of more than 550 people, reaching over 100 million monthly visitors. And along the way, he’s launched four regional language editions, expanded video into a major content operation, and now leads one of India’s most respected digital news organization. Few markets can actually match. More than a billion internet users consume content across dozens of major languages, making it one of the most demanding environments for any content business. And in this conversation, we’ll explore what building trust at scale teaches us about leadership, and AI, and multilingual publishing and the future of digital content. Nandagopal, it’s great to have you on the show.

[00:01:52] Nandagopal Rajan: Thank you. It’s my pleasure, Jason.

[00:01:55] Jason Hemingway: Brilliant. Well, look, let’s get to the first question. And you joined the Indian Express digital team, what, 2013, when it was around 30 people, pretty much in a basement. And today you’re now running this 550-person operation as the CEO. So, for our listeners who may not know your background, how did you get from a kind of newspaper launch team to one of the leading Indian digital media businesses?

[00:02:22] Nandagopal Rajan: It was my second standard experience. I had spent six years earlier in a very traditional newsroom environment where I was in charge of bringing out multiple editions. And I had gone to another organization, where I was also editing a tech magazine, which overnight became digital. And I was sort of pushed to becoming a digital person. But coming back, it was purely in a digital role. And this was when Anand Goenka, who is our Executive Director, had come back from the U.S, and was thinking of, you know, he was thinking of the next decade, you know, how do you prepare Indian Express for the next decade? And Indian Express is now almost a 100-year-old organization. So, we’re a very, very legacy newsroom. You know, how do you bring that up to speed? And he wanted to invest in digital, and he had a lot of great ideas. So, that’s when somebody suggested my name. I came back, and then we were a very small team, but that was our biggest advantage, right? So, we were like, you know, though we were sort of an extension of the legacy newsroom, we worked like a startup. So, we did a lot of things before others, right? And one of the first things Anand did was we were maybe among the first big publishers to move to WordPress VIP, which at that time was a leap of faith because everybody was doing homegrown CMSs. And we decided to go completely radical WordPress. It wasn’t a place you would find a large news organization in, right? Like, you know, it was more of a, okay, you run your blog on WordPress. It can be a large blog kind of thing. So, that was a leap of faith. We went WordPress VIP. Immediately got to know that that was a superpower we had, you know, because, you know, from a point where the website would sort of break down every time we hit a traffic threshold to becoming, you know, so scalable and, you know, completely elastic when it came to traffic going up and down, which is how India works, right? Especially then in the days when Google was just driving traffic, you know, up your alley. So, that was, you know, that was a phase. Being a startup, thinking, you know, completely creative, what do we do next? Which audience do we look for next? That kind of a thing. That’s also how we thought that Indian Express journalism, which is unique, is becoming stronger by the day because of what we do. How do we take it into more languages, right? India, all said and done. English, it’s one of the largest English-speaking populations in the world, but it’s still a fraction of the country, right? You know, so that’s where, you know, we started expanding into languages, you know, where we did not have a foothold. Okay, it was an uphill task because all of these markets, publishing is not new in India, it’s 200 years old, at least, and you have these legacy players who completely command the markets, going into those markets, doing something new, capturing the eyeballs and attention and then showing that, okay, we have a lot of journalism, which is otherwise not available in your market. I think that was the idea. I think all of that is sort of, you know, coming to fruition now, and we are seeing, you know, we are now reaping the dividends of having done that.

[00:05:26] Jason Hemingway: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s a fascinating story. And like you say, with those incumbents in place, it’s very much a sort of challenger brand story, isn’t it? Where you’ve had to challenge and innovate and think differently about the market. So, you’ve also said before, the Indian Express must also always be content-led. What does that sort of mean when you’re also running a massive digital business at scale?

[00:05:50] Nandagopal Rajan: Being content-led, I think all websites are content-led in that sense. But being content-led also means that you think content first, right? It’s always journalism first. It shouldn’t be that, like we used to have the saying long back in the newsroom, that, you know, good journalism cannot, you know, die on the altar of good design. So, like, you know, we can’t be compromising because of technology. We can’t be compromising because of product, right? The journalism always has to shine through. And it’s not easy, right? Because there are a lot of things that you have to do because, if you have to stay relevant, let’s look at the platform phase, right? Like, you know, I think we are at the other end of the platform phase now. Maybe AI ends up becoming a new platform phase altogether. But we are at the end of that. Like, you know, we all cater to, okay, what do you need to do for the Facebook market? What do you need to do for the Google market? Right? So, we were, even in that phase, we were always like, we will not compromise on the content. Maybe we will push the envelope a little bit on what we can do. But we will not end up doing it. And that, I think, in hindsight, has worked for us because while others were chasing traffic, we ended up getting the readers, right? So, you know, we were able to hold on to a lot of our readers because there is a trust that we build over time. There is, like, you know, we didn’t do a lot of things which others were sort of compelled to do because they were catering to the platforms, right? So, that’s what I mean by content-led is that it’s always going to be, as in journalism-led is a better way to put it, you know, because content can sort of be diluting in that sense as a phrase, but we’ll always be journalism-led. That’s the product we sell. And that’s what we want to upfront and make shine through.

[00:07:33] Jason Hemingway: Yeah, it’s like staying true to a core principle of the business is very, very good and useful. So, look, you talked about trust then, and you spent your whole career figuring out how to tell stories that those customers or those subscribers trust. What do you wish that more business leaders understood? Maybe from how a good editor thinks about content or trust.

[00:07:56] Nandagopal Rajan: See, with content and, again, we are seeing a radical change in user behavior right now. So, for instance, like, you know, let’s say, and everybody’s talking about AI slop. It might be the best thing to happen to legacy players. Like, you know, people come back and check whether, let’s say, that Pope walking in a puffer jacket is that available with the Indian Express or the New York Times? If it’s not, maybe I can’t trust it, right? So, trust, and again, you have to keep on building these layers of trust, which is, you know, sort of to do with the time also, right? To give you a good example, like, you know, India has a very infamous television market. You know, it’s a very infamous television market. We used to see, about 10 years back, suddenly in the middle of the, you know, during Prime time for TV, we’d see some of our old stories get a lot of traction. And we realized that one, the TV is not sticking to any news cycle. They’re just doing the story they want to do. And then people are coming to check on Indian Express whether Indian Express has actually reported it. And maybe we reported it three weeks back, and TV is picking it up now for whatever agenda. Yeah, so they are verifying, right? So, we came to this paradox. You know, so that is the trust that we have built in people. And we have seen this multiple times. For instance, last year, there was a little bit of a, like, a few days of conflict between India and Pakistan, which was like, you know, we were on the edge. And that was the best time we had for subscriptions. Because we would start the day by saying, “Hey, anything that we do will be double-checked and verified by an Indian Express reporter. Otherwise, we will not publish.” And TV was going crazy, you know. And we got a 3x, 4x jump in our daily subscriptions. Because people, and we hadn’t paywalled any of this content in national interest, right? And people were just coming and saying, “Hey, I want to subscribe to Indian Express because I trust what they’re doing.” So, that is what we stand for, right? So, that is the trust. But the trust also, it’s not one monolith. You have to, sort of, you have to evolve to the requirements of the times. And that’s a user requirement, right? How do we take those two extra steps to get to the reader? I think that’s more important.

[00:10:08] Jason Hemingway: And trust is built over time, isn’t it? It’s not just, like you say, it’s not one-off. It’s consistency, and it’s all of those things that you mentioned, but over a consistent period of time.

[00:10:20] Nandagopal Rajan: And it’s not just what you publish, right? I strongly believe it’s also what you don’t publish, right? We don’t think it is important enough to be covered. It is also a matter of trust. Right? Has Express covered it? No. Maybe not. It’s not worth my time. That’s how I think a lot of our readers look at it.

[00:10:38] Jason Hemingway: I think there’s a lot of lessons in how content teams publish or how businesses publish in that. Is it worth it? And is it good? And is it consistent for the long run? Interesting. So, on to my next sort of question I had for you, Nandagopal. India has, like, I don’t know, something, like, is it 22 different official languages? And then I was reading, there’s over a thousand distinct mother tongues. And then we said at the beginning, didn’t we, about a billion internet users. And you alluded to it, I think, with most of the growth coming from people who prefer content in their regional language. And it strikes me that it’s arguably the most complex content market on earth. Readers across India don’t just speak different languages. They have different cultural contexts and expectations. And do you find that people wanted different stories, or simply different ways of telling them, perhaps? It’s intriguing to me, with all those different things at play.

[00:11:36] Nandagopal Rajan: Yeah, so if you consider India as one homogeneous unit, you’re going to fail. Whatever be your product. Like, you know, I’ve been a tech journalist for 20 years. If you launch a tech product thinking, okay, I’m going to hit this large Indian market, it’s not going to work. You need to, again, look at the sensibilities, sensitivities of each market. What’s the language you speak to them there? Like, you know, that’s very important, right? So, my personal experience, okay, the first regional language that I launched was in my mother tongue. Okay, I was feeling very proud that, okay, I’m giving back to my mother tongue. And it was reasonably successful. The next language I did was Tamil, which is next door to my state. Very similar culturally, though the language is no different than, but even the language has commonalities. I thought a lot of my learning there could be used in Tamil. It didn’t work at all. Because, again, Tamil is much more older as a culture, is a little bit inward-looking, and these are things that I learned over the years, right? So, if, again, then my third language, it actually resonated more with my first language, Malayalam. Right? So, it’s very tough to think of India as one homogenous unit and tackle it. Requirements are different. Storytelling is different. Like, you know, my language, Malayalam, has a publishing history of about 400 years. Like, you know, it started off around the same time as the rest of the world, because, and if you know about Kerala, it’s a very cosmopolitan culture and with a lot of, you know, European influence. Yeah, so there, it’s also a very saturated market. So, you have to look at things very differently compared to, you know, the other markets. Like, you know, so what technology works, as in, you know, which platform works in each market, is also different. Requirements of the readers are different in each market. So, you have to think about it very, very differently. We also end up having what I call, like, you know, as I am sitting in this suburban city of Delhi called Noida, I think we have a Noida bias. Where we sit, we start looking at the world from our perspective. It’s like the U.S doing internal competition and calling it the World Series, right? We think that’s the world. It doesn’t work that way. So, we have a strong bias. We need to, so, like, for instance, English reading is mostly in the south of India and to the east of India. Right? Because of many reasons. We don’t cover those areas that well enough in English. Right? We end up covering a lot of the Hindi heartland, which the platforms, for instance, optimize for Hindi. They don’t let English content be accessed very easily in those markets. Right? So, there is this skew, this bias that comes in, knowingly or unknowingly, which is very difficult to plug in a market like India. And I think that is where technology can really help. It still hasn’t. I haven’t seen anybody crack this personalization or localization really well. But that’s something, you know, in a market like India, that’s where, you know, you really need to think about tapping it. And the other thing is that, especially with Indian Express, we have a huge diaspora audience, international audience. I wouldn’t say purely diaspora, but I think global audiences also look at Indian Express as an entry point into India. Now, what they need is very different from what the internal audiences need. Right? Even if they are Indians, let’s say in the U.S or the UK, they don’t want to read the same stories that New Delhi is reading, you know, because their context is very different. So, it’s very, very complex. Now, on top of that is the complexity of monetization. Very simply put, let’s say the CPM rates of English is a dollar; all the regional languages are at a fraction, which doesn’t really make much sense to me because some of these, again, the English-reading audience is not a different audience from the regional markets, right? Most of us are multilingual, right? If I’m reading in Malayalam, I’m also reading in English. So, I’m the same audience. But if I am targeted on a Malayalam page, I’m targeted at 25 cents instead of a dollar in English, which doesn’t make much sense to me because it should be more audience-led than the language-led, than being language-led. So, that’s very confusing. But this also makes the scale that we play in at India, like, you know, so I am scared, usually, and I’ve chosen that word very carefully, scared talking to, let’s say, SaaS players in the U.S or other parts of the world because they look at our numbers and they come up with astronomical figures. We don’t make that kind of money from the kind of audiences we have. Right? The audiences, the scale of audiences, are huge, but we don’t make that kind of money, you know? You know, let’s say an American publisher with 10% of our audience would be making 10 times more money than us.

[00:16:29] Jason Hemingway: Again, that is a regional, not bias, but it’s a regional factor, isn’t it, that you should consider when you’re thinking about going into a market; you need to understand the monetization in that market and perhaps whether it makes sense. I do think technology, as you kind of said, technology promises to kind of make all of that easier as we go forward, I think, speaking from a language technology bias, perhaps myself, but I do think that that kind of thing’s becoming much easier than it has been in the past to do.

[00:16:57] Nandagopal, thank you for a brilliant conversation. You gave us a very clear picture of how to build trust, serve lots of diverse audiences, and scale a digital business in one of the world’s most complicated markets in India.

[00:17:10] And with that, that’s it for In Other Words, a podcast from Phrase. I’ve been your host, Jason Hemingway, and a big thank you to Nandagopal Rajan for joining us today. If this episode made you think about how your content strategy needs to evolve as your business expands into new languages and markets, we’d love to continue that conversation. So, head to phrase.com to find out more. For more conversations on leadership growth and what it takes to scale globally, subscribe to In Other Words on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts or your favourite podcast platform. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you again next time.