BloombergQuint Wins Gold At South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020

BloombergQuint has won a Gold at the South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020, presented by WAN-IFRA.

BQ Blue, BloombergQuint's premium subscription offering that delivers exclusive content in the form of subscriber-only stories, live shows, podcasts, newsletters, and events received Gold for Best Paid Content Strategy.  

The awards, by the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, are the most prestigious recognition for publishers for outstanding work in digital media. As a Gold winner at the South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020, BQ Blue will now be part of the nominees for the World Digital Media Awards, competing with other winners from Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America. The world award winners will be announced later this year. 

Anil Uniyal, CEO, BloombergQuint, said: "We at BloombergQuint are absolutely delighted by winning gold at WAN IFRA’s South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020 for our subscription product, BQ Blue. Our rigorous focus on quality and credible content as well as product innovation has powered us. Today, 40,000-plus paid subscribers validate our premium BQ Blue product, and this recognition is an additional booster. This win comes close on the heels of our WhatsApp content distribution strategy becoming a Harvard Business Review case study. These successes motivate us to continue to innovate, improve, and invest in offering a world-class product to our subscribers."  

A pioneer in paywalls in the South Asian digital media space when it introduced BQ Blue in December 2018, BloombergQuint has developed a well-honed hybrid model that allows subscribers exclusive benefits. Readers are offered free, metered, and hard paywall stories. To engage with Indian audiences and to familiarise them with BQ Blue, BloombergQuint also launched the pay-per-article feature which allowed readers to pay a nominal amount and gain exposure to BQ Blue content on the website.  

The other winners of South Asian Digital Media Awards 2020 along with BloombergQuint are BBC News, NDTV, The Hindu, Malayala Manorama, as well as BloombergQuint's sister brand, The Quint. 

 This is the second time BloombergQuint is being recognised at the South Asian Digital Media Awards. In 2019, BloombergQuint won Silver for Best Paid Content Strategy. BloombergQuint was also among eight news organizations from the Asia Pacific region selected for Google News Initiative's Subscription Lab, a programme that helps publishers strengthen digital subscription capabilities.

BQ Blue is a premium service that gives subscribers unrestricted access to BloombergQuint’s deeply analytical, investigative journalism and innovative, special projects. Subscribers also get unrestricted access to all stories, columns, podcasts, live shows, and videos, as well Bloomberg and Businessweek content on Bloombergquint.com. The service also includes in-depth equity and economy research reports from India’s top brokerages, asset managers, and research agencies.