The Indian Express

The Indian Express launch a Subscription Business with Evolok Paywall

Introduction

The Indian Express is an English-language daily newspaper published in India. It is one of India's earliest English newspapers. The Indian Express Group owns the newspaper, which was started in 1931. The Indian Express went from a single-edition weekly in Madras to a multi-edition publication that influenced thinking and politics across the country. The Indian Express and The Financial Express in English, the Loksatta in Marathi, and the Jansatta in Hindi are among the publications it distributes. The sites collectively draw over 200 million unique users every month, with indianexpress.com accounting for around 100 million of those.

The Objective

In 2021, The Indian Express wanted to explore a meter-based subscription model to aid their digital strategy to increase user acquisition and create revenue by attracting new subscribers.

Before the Covid 19 pandemic the Indian print newspaper sector appeared to be in good shape, and affiliate news websites were under minimal pressure to create non-advertising revenue. But this changed in 2020 when the Covid 19 pandemic disrupted the supply chain of print distribution.

The first quarter was really bad, to be honest, because the demand just fell and prices also fell. So revenues took a big hit. I think we were down by almost 50% during those three months

Sanjay Sindhwani

CEO Digital at Indian Express Online

The Indian Express, like many other news organisations throughout the world, has pushed for digital subscriptions in part due to issues with the digital advertising model.

The Solution

The Indian Express needed a technology partner to provide a full ecosystem to include Identity Management, Segmentation, Paywall and Commerce features. 

One of the first few publishers leading the way in the country, Indian Express was one of the first newspaper websites to implement a subscription business model. Indian Express decided to use the full suite of Evolok for this purpose. Evolok supported The Indian Express in establishing a paywall, managing user profiles, supporting social registration, and developing a single login feature for frictionless customer journeys, among other tech-related goals. In an ambitious drive to ramp up engagement and unlock new digital revenue, these initiatives will raise daily visitors. Evolok’s cutting-edge solutions cover everything from identity management to access optimization and monetisation capabilities and customer segmentation.

Evolok became our partner of choice following a full analysis of subscription vendors available on the market. We were impressed with what we saw in terms of features and product capabilities and the product roadmap that was shared with us

Sanjay Sindhwani

CEO Digital at Indian Express Online

The Result

Since implementing the paywall system The Indian Express has seen a solid uptake in user acquisition and building on a robust subscriptions business. 

Many new features including OTP, Magic Link and frictionless payments have helped simplify the registration and subscription process. 

IndianExpress.com uses Evolok to drive its hybrid subscription strategy of having both Premium news, that is gated and a metered paywall that offers a number of articles for free reading before challenging the user to subscribe.