Can ChatGPT script a new future of marketing?

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by Samuel Pordengerg Feb 23, 2023 News
Can ChatGPT script a new future of marketing?

Digital news publishers in India have lost 20-40 per cent of their mobile traffic over the past few months due to a number of reasons.

A drop in sales of mobile phones, decline in data consumption, and a drop in news consumption are some of the reasons why referral traffic to news websites is decreasing.

Many publishers have seen their mobile traffic decline in the last few months. There could be a 10 per cent decline in the number of phones shipped in 2022. The head of a digital publication said that the internet and broadband user base in India is not growing.

In the last two months, the drop was significant.

The listed media houses don't want to be recorded.

They don't want to talk about it publicly as they have to show to the investors that their digital platforms are doing well Despite several requests, the Digital News Publishers Association didn't reply to questions.

The newspapers, which lost a lot of ad revenue during the Pandemic, are still not back to their pre-Covid levels. According to E4m, the entry of artificial intelligence-chatbots by Microsoft and Google is likely to further diminish their referral traffic.

70 to 90 per cent of traffic to news websites come from mobile devices. Their share in ad revenue is mostly the same as their share in desktop traffic.

The mobile phone's ad revenue share is usually less than the desktop's. It will have about 35 per cent of revenue share if desktop has 30 per cent traffic.

Most of the traffic to news websites comes from search engines. A portion of India's ad revenue was shared with digital publishers by the internet giant.

There is inflation.

According to the International Data Corporation's (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, the market for India's smartphones declined by 10% in the last four years. This is the lowest since the beginning of the year.

In the last quarter, shipments declined 27%. The price of mobile phones has gone up due to inflation.

The average selling price hit a record in 2022. The entry level segment was down from a year ago. The lack of new launches in this critical mass segment was a barrier for new users.

While the low income group is not able to buy a phone due to inflation and economic constraints, those who have the phones are not consuming content the way they used to during the Pandemic as businesses and schools are open now.

In India, the world's second largest mobile phone market, internet growth seems to have slowed. 790 million wireless broadband subscribers were counted by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. It had more subscribers in August than it did in August. Between 2016 and 2020 the number of mobile internet subscribers grew by double digits.

For the past two years, the number of people using broadband has remained the same. Comscore data shows that the number of people using it for social media, video or entertainment has not changed in the last year.

News consumption went down.

The news domain is under pressure due to decreasing news consumption. The current discourse is dominated by cases of horrible crimes. A news channel head told e4m that most of the mobile users are fed up with such content and have stopped surfing the news websites.

News is more important than entertainment and social media. OTT and gaming apps consumption growth has accelerated over the past few years which has resulted in more walled garden surfing and thus impacted the web traffic of news sites.

The traffic of English and Hindi news outlets was affected by the availability of search in regional languages.

The push to narrow the losses is regional.

To expand their reach among mobile-first consumers in regional markets, leading publishers have started launching the language editions of their news websites.

Four digital news platforms were launched by the group. The Indian Express Group launched websites in several regional languages last year.