To curtail to the spread of Covid-19, the planet is on pause and these are difficult times for human race. As self quarantine and social distancing becomes the new normal, at-home entertainment options saw an upswing. Amid the lockdown, people have turned to social media to stay updated, informed & entertained.
In this phase of lockdown, Jagran New Media is staunchly dedicated to providing factual & credible content to its users & as per Google Analytics (15th March’20-11th Apr’20) have been successfully able to reach out to 112 Mn users with News & Info genre registering the user growth by 80% & page views growth by 91% . The other genres like lifestyle & health saw user growth of 24% and 32% each. Change in consumption pattern accelerated the sessions and registered a growth of 102% over pre-lockdown phase in the News & Info category.
The epaper also reflected a growth of 93% and 1 Mn users whereas the news app grew remarkably by 77% . The video views also saw a spike of 116% and the watch time grew by 100%. The top 30 towns across Hindi Heartland registered user growth of 58%.
Roshan Tamang, Head- Audio & Video said, “”The lockdown phase has seen a sharp traction in video consumption of our legit and round-the-clock coverage of Coronavirus developments in India as well as across the globe. Since the lockdown began, we have clocked 83.1 million Video Views on the topic and gained 2,40,892 subscribers, a testimony to our sticky content.”
In addition to providing the regular content, our key content strategy revolved around various buckets like fact check, news, education, health, women & lifestyle. A special content pipeline has been designed for every genre to provide the users with something meaningful in these times. In order to provide the most reliable content, experts from various fields have also been looped in. For instance, News genre will be focusing on covering Factual & credible content for the Hindi Heartland, Covid News, Real time News & Analysis from our authentic sources & local weather updates. The lifestyle portal especially designed for women- HerZindagi started the ‘Lockdown Challenge’ asking the users to utilize this time to learn a new skill, cook interesting meals, brush up their GK etc. JagranJosh, the leading education site, started a special page- Study at home, which is the new normal now, to help its users to get through this phase without missing on the academic growth. Our Health portal- Onlymyhealth also started the ‘War Against Virus’ campaign focusing on bringing expert vetted information, precautions and do’s and don’ts around the Covid19 infection. Onlymyhealth also took this opportunity to reach out to the users on social media with daily Instagram lives bringing audiences directly in touch with doctors, nutritionists, mental health experts who answer burning questions.
Megha Mamgain, Head-Health & Lifestyle Verticals said “With the flux of information and misinformation, our lifestyle and health sites have been able to provide users with perspective, context and credible stories. How a breaking news impacts the user, what the delay in vaccine really means, exactly how washing hands stops the spread of infection, how to best utilize lockdown period – OnlyMyHealth.com and HerZindagi.com have been able to create a clutter breaking & unique content flow that has found resonance and utility among the users.”
In the quest to contribute to society by silencing fake news and creating awareness & hope, Jagran New Media also took some key initiatives like Positive India series in partnership with Twitter. The series share extraordinary & inspiring stories of ordinary people to spark hope in these dark times. Given the flood of information on social media, some of which is dubious, VishavsNews– India’s first Hindi fact check platform took extra steps by transforming it’s highly successful event- Sach Ke Saathi into webinars so as to curb misinformation by creating more awareness in the society.
We also started providing latest news on the voice platforms for Apple and Google News- Amazon & Google, as 2-5 minutes top headlines of the day. We also have a 20 min news bulletin covering all top and detailed news from India & world in various genres. The bulletin & news headlines both are updated twice daily. Apart from news, we also have the highly popular ‘Home Remedies’ skill available in Hindi & English that gives simple and effective home remedies for common diseases.
All this lead to spurge in high online search volume and as anticipated, the news genre led the growth chart with Jagran.com indicating a jump of 85% in the users, 110% in the page views & 116% in the sessions.
During this period of pandemic-induced social isolation also, Jagran New Media is focused on factual and credible content production and to follow Jagran policy which believes in empowering citizens of India by keeping Jagran readers at the core.
Rajesh Upadhyay, Editior in Chief said, “ The young India demands nothing less than authentic, original, genuine & factual content. That’s why fact checking is one of the many safety nets that must be in place especially in such difficult times. VishwasNews works in association with Facebook, GNI, ByteDance, Twitter & does fact checking work in 10+ languages. We also work closely with WHO, PIB to fight together with the menace of misinformation plaguing the society.”