Landing Page: Amid shrinking ad pie, will fight for prime placement intensify?

With Zee Media exiting from BARC, citing landing pages and barker pages as the biggest concern and challenge, the issue has once again come into the spotlight. Landing page has been the bone of contention in the broadcast industry for a long time now with no solution in sight.

Those who can afford it, can buy this premium placing. There are many who consider placement on landing pages as giving an unfair advantage to the channels in terms of ratings. But the fact is that, landing page placement is not limited to a small set of channels. There are several who have been on landing pages at some point, using it a marketing tool for priority in discovery. Industry experts agree that by being directed to a channel on landing page, it favourably impacts that channel’s viewership data as against the channels who cannot afford or do not buy placement on landing pages.

When Adgully reached out to Shashi Sinha, Chairman, BARC India, to find out what steps the ratings measurement body is taking to address the industry’c concerns, he said, “The landing page matter is in court and there is a stay on it. What do you want BARC to do when there is a stay on landing pages?”

SInha further said, “Landing page is done outside the BARC system, at the Headend and Distributor level.” He added that while BARC has an algorithm which works, but no algorithm can be foolproof.

As the ad revenue pie shrinks for the news broadcast industry, the fight for visibility, TRPs and ad monies will only become fiercer in the coming times. As Sinha pointed out, “The news industry is just 6-7% of the overall broadcast pie.”

As per industry sources, the ad revenues of the news industry has declined from 10% to 6%. A surge was seen during the Covid period, when news consumption was high and also because of lack of fresh programming on other channel genres due to a ban on shootings. However, in the post-pandemic times when situation returned to normalcy, the ad pie for the news industry has gone down.