India's premier business and financial news brand BloombergQuint and the leading news and commentary portal Swarajya both supported by Quintype have won Bronze and a Gold at WAN IFRA South Asia Digital Media Awards 2018.
Bloomberg Quint (BQ) bagged the award for the best 'Social Media Engagement' and Swarajya has been awarded for the best 'Reader Revenue Initiative'. The awards, presented by the World Association of Newspaper and Publishers (WAN-IFRA), recognise the best-practice innovation in the digital publishing.
Catalysing the big win, Quintype's content management software helped BloombergQuint integrate its content with social media to enable its users to receive customised content. For Swarajya, Quintype created backend support to help manage and grow reader revenue by tracking contributions to the content readers specifically care about.
"Its heartening to see two of our publishers winning the WAN AFRA awards. We are proud to partner with publishers like BloombergQuint and Swarajya to help create customised content for readers on various social distribution channels and provide turnkey solutions for managing subscriptions and reader revenue," said Chirdeep Shetty, CEO, Quintype.
Awarded for the best Social Media Engagement BloombergQuints's free, interactive and opt-in subscription WhatsApp service-'All you need to know', offer news snippets, podcasts, market updates and breaking news to its users. The chatbot-style service and the hashtag-based search allow users to check trending news, relevant stories and stock prices in real-time. An average BloomberQuint user now spends around two minutes on WhatsApp reading about five pages of content. The users consume more than 1.5 million pages through the messaging service every month. The high user engagement means WhatsApp is now an essential part of every publisher's content strategy. Quintype helped BloomberQuint acquire the first mover advantage. The channel has now crossed 300,000 subscribers, contributing significantly to website's referral traffic.
"Getting recognised as best in the Social Media Engagement is a proud moment for us at Bloomberg Quint. The flexibility offered by Quintype CMS platform enabled us to engage our audience through social messaging, podcasts and personalised watch lists," said Ankit Dhadda, Head Marketing and Products at BloombergQuint.
Founded in 1956, Swarajya is one of the few media houses in India securing a subscription-based revenue of more than one crore. With a subscription base of 8000+ active users and a growth of 40% in subscription, Quintype's innovation helped Sawarajya in creating the reader-based revenue model. The two editorial campaigns pegged to the themes of heritage and campus life were initiated last year to engage readers with the issues related to heritage conservation and campus culture. The deliverables like videos, articles and social media messaging, educated and informed the readers. As the campaign progressed, Quintype's subscription management platform allowed Swarajya to track the subscription and contribution patterns. The ultimate aim and the idea were to get away from the pressure of creating advertising-friendly content and increase user engagement through data-driven publishing.
"We are happy to be able to convince our readers to pay - paying for good content is how this industry can thrive. Given our sales efforts and Quintype's product support we're confident of scaling up our subscriptions and reader revenue operations significantly," said Amarnath Govindrajan, Chief Digital Officer, Swarajya Magazine.
Earlier this year Quintype also bagged two CMS recognitions from FinancesOnline a renowned business software directory. Quintype was awarded under the Great User Experience and the Rising Star category for 2018.
Founded in 2014, Quintype is a data-driven publishing start-up that provides digital publishing platform to the leading media ventures like The Quint, Samachara, Fortune India, and National Herald.
As the media industry shifts from, mobile first to the mobile-only content strategy, Quintype has helped content creators in capturing the new landscape of audiences and linking it with monetisation. The awards are a recognition of the fact that Quintype is propelling its innovation in the right direction.
