Bengaluru-based VerSe Innovation, the parent company of news and content aggregator Dailyhunt, has acquired Magzter, a New York-headquartered digital newsstand, for an undisclosed value.
This acquisition brings in 1.1 million paying subscribers for Dailyhunt in India and opens a new revenue stream for the company besides advertisement.
Founded in 2011, Magzter has more than 8,500 magazines and newspapers on its platform across 60 languages.
Speaking to YourStory, VerSe Innovation’s Co-founder, Umang Bedi, said, “This acquisition helps us in addressing the requirements of the premium audience who want an advertisement-free environment.”
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Dailyhunt has been engaged with Magzter for over a year now to finetune its model to cater to the content needs of a discerning audience. According to Bedi, Dailyhunt has been receiving constant feedback from a certain section of its users who are keen on consuming news content without advertisements.
“We felt that there is a definite synergy if we can take this basket (Magzter) and offer it to the Indian users,” he said.
Dailyhunt has over 350 million monthly active users across its app and mobile web platform. Bedi believes 10 million from this base are potential paying subscribers.
“This is where Magzter fits in because it helps in addressing premium audiences who seek high quality content,” he said.
The co-founders of Magzter, Girish Ramdas and Vijayakumar Radhakrishnan, will now be part of Dailyhunt.
Magzter has a global user base of 87 million with titles such as The Economist, Forbes, Fortune, Conde Nast, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair.
Bedi believes there is huge potential to grow subscription revenue from English content given that around 40% of its existing user base on Dailyhunt choose English as their second or primary language.
“One of our learnings in this whole business is that we are really serving the educated rising middle class of India, both across local languages and English,” he added.
VerSe Innovation, which also runs the short video platform Josh, registered a revenue of Rs 1,809 crore in FY23, at an annual growth of 57%.
According to Bedi, the company has been running an EBITDA positive business for the last two years and this number is in double digits.
VerSe’s co-founder said the company has always been focused on expanding its user base, building on the benchmarks of engagement, retention and time spent. The end result is to create a meaningful revenue stream, said Bedi.
“Our ad tech platform was built on revenue maximisation,” he added.
VerSe Innovation was founded in 2007; the initial years were focused on the mobile value added services business. Dailyhunt as a platform was established in 2016.
Edited by Swetha Kannan
