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Why India’s newspaper industry is thriving.
- stephengillie 14y agoThis article is mostly newspaper fetishisim about the company's owners. What HN is interested in was contained in a single, unsurprising paragraph. I've cut it up to comment: One reason that Indian newspapers thrive is the absence of digital competition. Less than ten per cent of the population has access to the Internet, and, with two-thirds of the population surviving on less than two dollars per day, expensive smartphones and tablets aren’t about to replace print media as the news-reading platform of choice. So the state of today's Indian newspaper industry is the same as USA's in about 2000. Also, Indian papers are cheap, costing between five and ten cents daily. There are few newsstands in India—only five per cent of papers are sold over the counter—and home delivery is free, paid for by the publishers. As philanthropic as "paid for by the publishers" sounds, it means the delivery fee is paid for indirectly, instead of charging it explicitly on the bill. I think the article is trying to say that newspaper delivery is expected in India. The actual price of each paper is even lower, because of what Indians call raddi, their recycling program. Subscribers save their newspapers, which are picked up by raddiwallahs each month; the customer receives about ten cents per pound, and the raddiwallahs sell the bundles back to the paper companies to be recycled.* The first result on DDG says a Sunday newspaper can weigh nearly one pound in large cities. Assuming the other 6 pages per day combined weigh another pound means recycling can pay for a couple of free newspapers per week. This makes me wonder about CPK rates in India.