A content business creates and distributes valuable digital assets (videos, blogs, podcasts, etc.) to engage and retain a specific audience, ultimately supporting business goals such as brand awareness, lead generation, or sales, rather than directly pushing products. It is a strategic, long-term approach to building authority, trust, and loyalty by consistently solving audience problems with relevant, helpful, or entertaining content, forming a core part of modern marketing.
Key aspects of a content business:
- Content Creation: Producing various formats such as articles, videos, infographics, emails, and social media posts.
- Audience Building: Attracting users by meeting their needs, not just selling to them.
- Value & Relevance: Providing useful information that educates, entertains, or inspires.
- Distribution: Sharing content across platforms where the target audience spends time.
- Strategic Goals: Driving business objectives such as leads, sales, or brand loyalty.
Content marketing business involves content sourced through partnerships with publication houses, media companies, and digital companies. The content is available in three forms: text, images, and videos. Media companies send articles that may include all three formats.
Top publication houses include ANI (Asian News International), Press Trust of India (PTI), The Times of India, Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, and television networks such as Living Media Group, ABP Group, Zee Business, NDTV Group, Sun TV Group, Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhaskar Group, and many others, all of whom contribute as partners. These publication houses are primarily news content providers.
There are also General Entertainment Channels (GECs) such as Sony, JioStar, Zee, and various regional channels. These channels produce movies, serials, and short-form content, which they provide to streaming platforms and publications for distribution and viewership.
Another segment comprises individual blogger communities that produce articles and videos on trending topics or specialised areas such as health, lifestyle, travel, food, and fashion. These videos are created either by agencies or individuals and shared with partners for monetisation, viewership, subscriptions, and memberships.
The publishing model is broadly of two types. The first provides only a short four-to-five-line introduction with a headline before redirecting users to the publication house. This is not an ideal model, as traffic is directed away from the platform to the original content creator or publisher. Here, the content creator uses the platform primarily to generate traffic, while the platform acts only as an aggregator without investing in content creation or production.
The second model hosts the complete article or video exclusively, or partly exclusively, on the platform itself. Subscribers and members can access this content either free of charge or through a paid model. The key advantage is that users remain on the platform, generating views, engagement time, consumption data, and revenue. The success of this model depends on whether the objective is merely app downloads or app downloads combined with sustained engagement and usage. If the focus is only on downloads, the traffic redirection model works. However, if engagement and retention are priorities, the content should remain on the platform. This requires a well-defined commercial model.
What commercial models can be adopted?
Licence Fee: A fixed monthly fee or a per-article fee is paid to the content provider.
Revenue Share: Advertising revenue is shared between the content creator and the content publisher. Typically, the industry follows a 50:50 revenue-sharing model. For well-known bloggers, offering a higher revenue share—or even the full revenue—can be worthwhile, as their brand helps drive engagement without fixed content acquisition costs.
Ingestion Model: A self-service content ingestion tool should be provided for publishers and contributors, reducing manual effort for the internal team. Category-wise buckets can be created so that content is automatically ingested.
User Experience (UX): Personalisation is critical. The system should recommend content based on user preferences and behaviour, making algorithms and tagging extremely important. Comscore integration is also essential for attracting major publishers, allowing them to track the traffic their articles receive on the platform. This process is known as canonical tagging.
Companies should also invest in creating original shows. Original content drives traffic, builds long-term engagement, and creates differentiation.
Regional languages are equally important alongside English, as they account for nearly 67% of India’s new internet audience. Major languages include Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Gujarati, and Punjabi. Regional content has become a major growth driver, as audiences increasingly prefer consuming content in their native language.
- Demand for Localisation: More than 70% of Indian viewers prefer content in their native languages, driving investment in regional productions.
- Diverse Markets: India’s fragmented linguistic landscape means a one-size-fits-all approach does not work. Regional stories create deeper audience connections.
- Growth Engine: Regional content is key to capturing the next wave of growth beyond metropolitan audiences.
- Dominance: Regional languages account for more than 50% of India’s paid OTT market.
- Content Volume: Regional language content production is projected to increase, potentially surpassing Hindi content volumes.
- Consumption: Viewership in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, and other regional languages is growing rapidly, particularly across Tier II, Tier III cities, and Bharat.
- Mobile-First: Mobile streaming accounts for nearly 85% of OTT viewership, making accessible regional content crucial.
As the saying goes, “Content is King.” Relevant content is the foundation of creating a strong brand presence in the consumer’s mind. How content can be monetised while remaining relevant will be explored in Part B.
Rajiv S. Sawhney
Professor of Practice
School of Business