Network18’s hyper-local news portal in vernacular languages, Pradesh18.com, shows a rapid growth in its user base crossing 10 mn unique users last month as per Google Analytics.
Pradesh18.com is a unique digital destination and one its kind that focuses on state-wise news in various regional languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu. More languages are to be added such as Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam.
The primary growth of Pradesh18.com has come from its Hindi language portal. As a changing trend, a lot of content is being consumed through mobile devices and that has added to the growth of the portal facilitating any content, anywhere. Complementary to major growth coming from mobile medium, 74% of its audience are young readers below the age of 34 while 26% are above the age of 40. Though the audience is fairly dominated by males but female share is growing and is at 17% as per October numbers.
Manish Maheshwari, CEO of Network18 Digital attributes the success of Pradesh18.com to the product’s unique & single minded proposition to cater to the news & happenings of reader’s locality, district, city and state. He says, “Pradesh18.com is a platform to provide news at district level to its readers & in the language in which one prefers. We aspire to cover India inch by inch”. Manish Maheshwari further adds “Digital growth will come from vernacular languages and through mobile medium and Pradesh18.com is uniquely poised to benefit from both these factors”.
Pradesh18.com also contains the high quality video news content & Live TV content of popular ETV channels in respective states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Haryana.