While content maybe king, relevance is queen & we plan to master both: Ritu Kapur

Founded by media stalwarts Raghav Bahl and Ritu Kapur, The Quint is media with intelligence. The digital content platform celebrated its first full day of publishing on thequint.com on March 16, 2015.

Visual elements are a big part of the portal’s storytelling and hence, the heavy reliance on graphics, maps and interactive timelines.

Apart from news, The Quint has also been doing campaigns that are fun, fearless and feisty. One of the earliest campaigns – #MakeOutInIndia – encouraged people to talk about sex, break perceptions and clean out the cobwebs of hypocrisy. On Republic Day this year, the portal started the #LetterToIndia campaign, wherein everyone was allowed to throw bouquets and brickbats in their own way.

In conversation with Adgully, Ritu Kapur, Co-Founder, The Quint, speaks about The Quint’s one-year journey, the growing significance of video content, interactivity and more. Excerpts:

One year of The Quint.
We started off as a Facebook page in January last year and for a month and a half we were just a Facebook entity, which was by design because we understand that social media is the prime media for distribution and discovery of content. In March 16, 2015 we launched. We didn’t think that we would receive the kind of growth at the speed that we did. We started off with around 10,000 people who were coming to our site everyday, which doubled to 20,000. Our discovery was that we got to be where our audience is, so we started putting a lot of our content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and started creating content for each of these platforms individually, alongside creating content for our website as well.

We found that our engagement across different platforms was growing very rapidly and creating of original quality content, whether it has hard news or fun, entertainment content, across the sections people were engaging with it. We also found out that the more diverse our content was the more the engagement with our content was. We had to unlearn the way we created video for television and creation of video content was another craft, another art altogether. And we promoted that very aggressively and found that we had the highest engagement across most publishers on our video content on Facebook.

Ensuring high level of interactivity.
At our level we constantly have either a large campaign that encourages people to share their views and participate. On another level, we constantly try create conversations around the news that we carry. So, everyday we have either a poll on Twitter or graphics and views on anything that is happening. We not only ask people to send in their comments, but also incorporate them into our content, so that people can see what we are saying on the site and that we value what they are saying. We also encourage people to record happening and Whatsapp them to us.

Strength of content and creating differentiation.
We are doing video content. Most of the other sites are legacy sites where the content is primarily created for either television or for newspaper. We, on the other hand, create content for digital and for mobile. Over the past one year, the one thing that we’ve realised is that while content maybe king, relevance is queen and we plan on being the master of both. We are everything for everybody. Another thing that distinguished us is how much we use the mobile – we use it for distribution, for content gathering and as a platform for content consumption. The last thing that distinguished us is that we are doing very hardcore investigative stuff for digital and mobile.

The reader base.
Our audience is very young and we have a huge percentage of returning audience. Our audience primarily consumes content on mobile phones, which constitutes about 75 per cent of our audience. What has evolved over time is that a lot of our audience is coming from social media.

Advertiser profile.
We’ve had Motorola with us on two campaigns back to back. We have interest coming in from very diverse advertiser group, Currently we are working with HTC, cold drink brands, we’ve had Audi as a sponsor on another project, we’ve had StanChart working on a project. We have had interest shown by some very strong brands.

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