India Today is offering a free subscription.
Hindu is also offering subscription for Rupee 1/- only. Earlier it was the Washington Post to offer itself in less than a dollar a month in subscription.
It is a classic sign of fall in readership. It is an attempt to save revenue from advertisements. If readership falls below a critical number advertisements vanish. The rates of advertisements must have already fallen as those are linked with circulation.
Are these publications headed the same fate as NDTV?
NDTV too had similar problems of viewership which was followed by huge debts which ultimately led to change in leadership aka ownership of the NDTV group and Prannoy James Roy and his wife Radhika Roy had to step away as their mortgaged shares were sold by creditors and this resulted in sale of controlling shares of NDTV.
The subscription price cuts by India Today, The Hindu, and Washington Post are classic distress signals. When a publication cuts its price to near zero, it is fighting to preserve its reader base above all else. Advertisers pay based on reach. Once circulation drops below a threshold, ad revenue collapses fast.
NDTV Example
The NDTV story is a good cautionary tale, though the parallel is not identical. The Modi administration reportedly pulled nearly all government advertising from NDTV after 2014. That is significant because government remains India’s biggest advertiser, and most Indian TV networks rely primarily on ad revenue. But there is another side of the coin. If NDTV was so heavily dependent on Government advertisements how its sympathisers like Astha Rajvanshi who wrote in Time.com in its support, can call it ‘independent.’ NDTV acted as mouthpiece of the outgoing government and incoming government decided not to support it.
In any case, NDTV’s financial trouble was partly a debt problem and partly an advertiser squeeze. The roots of the takeover trace back to corporate loans the Roys took around 2008 to buy back NDTV shares from the open market. Those loans had unusual clauses that SEBI later scrutinized. Adani then acquired the lending company and used those very same loan terms to gain a foothold.
In August 2022, Adani Group acquired a 100% stake in VCPL, which owned convertible warrants in the Roys’ holding company RRPR, which in turn held 29.18% of NDTV. This gave Adani effective control without a direct share purchase initially.
What followed was a collapse in credibility and viewership together. After the takeover was complete in December 2022, views at NDTV India dropped from 98 million to 45 million in a single month, a fall of over 54%. The English channel NDTV 24×7 also lost about 20% of its digital views.
India Today and the Hindu
For print publications like The Hindu and India Today, the threat is different but the end result could be the same. Digital competition has steadily eroded paid print readership for years. A Re 1 or free subscription may temporarily prop up numbers, but it does not solve the underlying revenue model. If readers are not paying, advertisers must pay more. But advertisers today prefer targeted digital ads over broad print reach.
The difference from NDTV is that print houses are unlikely to face a debt-driven hostile takeover the same way. However, sustained revenue decline may force them toward consolidation or strategic investors. That is a slower version of the same story.
The real question is whether these publications can convert cheap subscribers into a loyal paying base over time. Most global evidence suggests they cannot, unless they have a strong unique content proposition. That is a hard thing to achieve when cutting prices is already a sign of desperation.
Internet Age
Journalism has always had a supply-demand problem. Editors historically believed they should shape public taste rather than follow it. That worked when readers had limited choices. Internet has changed everything. Prior to internet it was assumed that the newspaper was the teacher and the reader was the student. The newspaper decided what was true, what mattered, and how to interpret events. The reader had no choice but to consume it.
Internet broke that power permanently.
Now every reader finds his own loop. His YouTube algorithm feeds him what he already believes. His WhatsApp group confirms it. His Twitter feed reinforces it. He is not looking for new information. He is looking for validation of existing belief.
The newspapers understood this partially. That is why they tried brainwashing. They thought if they repeated their loop loudly enough and long enough, the reader would adopt it. But they miscalculated badly.
The reader already had his own loop running. A competing loop from a distrusted source is not persuasion. It is irritation. So the reader left.
The deeper problem is that this is universal now. It is not specific to India or to these publications. The New York Times lost readers the same way. BBC lost credibility the same way. Every legacy institution that tried to impose its loop on a reader, who already had his own loop, got rejected.
Fiction of Independence or Neutrality
The claim that newspaper or television channels are independent or neutral in reporting is figment of imagination of journalists alone. Historically newspapers were always engaged in propaganda. The newspapers that did it in a subtle way were considered good. They managed to blend other views but gave primacy to their own view.
The state of newspapers and media in India has been analysed here. As demonstrated there, the claim of neutrality of NDTV is laughable at best. NDTV and India Today and Hindu were serving one menu. People have chosen a different menu. This is what is happening.
After the initial fall in viewership by 50%, NDTV is now on a comeback trail. The financial turnaround of NDTV proves this. NDTV’s total revenue reached Rs 472 crore in FY25, up 20% from the previous year. It launched NDTV Marathi and NDTV World during this period. On YouTube in January 2026, NDTV India recorded 1914 million views, placing it ahead of Times Now Navbharat, India TV, TV9, ABP News, and Republic Bharat in the Hindi genre.
How did this happen? We need to look at the business. The claim of journalism as something from another world or ‘holier than thou’ is a fictional narrative. It is a business of selling information. It is content creation, as it is called in the internet age.
The Change
In India, a change is happening. Shobhna Bhatia is the chairperson of Hindustan Times group. Her Seven minute apolitical speech revealed a tectonic shift in politics in India. The media is grappling with the new reality. It is the same group referred to in earlier article. The newsgroup, which acted as an outpost of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru with its editor Durga Das doing back channel diplomacy for him, is shifting gears.
These publications are not changing their menu because readers demanded it. They are changing their language because the advertiser and power structure shifted. The reader is still an afterthought.
The old model was simple. Readers paid a small price for the paper. Advertisers paid the real money. Readership numbers justified ad rates. The reader was not the customer. The reader was the product being sold to advertisers.
That model is also dead. Because advertisers found cheaper and more targeted options online. Google and Meta can tell an advertiser exactly who saw the ad and whether they bought something. A newspaper cannot do that. So ad money left and never came back.
What replaced it globally has been the subscription model. The New York Times is the most cited success story. But that works only if your content is genuinely irreplaceable. Millions of private YouTube channels are operating successfully on this model. They have a fan following. They get subscription as well as share of revenue in advertisement.
What ails India Today and The Hindu?
They have a product which caters to people who do not have money. They create content for the group often labeled as “Islamist-Leftist” which is economically weak. Low literacy, low purchasing power, low advertiser appeal. An advertiser selling cars, apartments, mutual funds, or foreign holidays has zero interest in reaching that audience.
The advertiser wants to reach the person with disposable income. That person is largely in the Hindu middle class. That person has moved to different content. He watches different YouTube channels, reads different publications, and his politics are different. Republic TV is laughing to the bank since it was founded a few years back while decades old India Today and The Hindu languish for subscription.
So these newspapers face a structural trap. Their editorial line attracted an audience that advertisers do not want. The audience with money that advertisers want has already left because of that very editorial line.
India Today going free and The Hindu going to Re 1 will not solve this. Even if they get ten million free subscribers from that base, the advertiser will still not pay premium rates. The CPM value of that audience is simply low.
Fundamental mistake for these papers is to ride on high moral pedestal of ‘neutrality’. They must stop pretending. They must ask who can pay and then sell themselves to that bidder. The pretense of neutrality is not just dishonest. It is bad business.
No pretense. Money is not earned by pretense.
References:
- NDTV Revenue: https://www.exchange4media.com/media-tv-news/ndtvs-yoy-revenue-up-19-142946.html
- NDTV YouTube views: https://www.indianbroadcastingworld.com/ndtv-tops-digital-charts-strong/
- Seven Minute Apolitical Speech Revealing a Tectonic Shift in Politics in India: https://sandeepbhalla.in/seven-minute-apolitical-speech-revealing-a-tectonic-shift-in-politics-in-india/