Digital DNA

It turns out that ‘the generation that won’t spend’ has actually grown up and is spending. On digital content

- Dhvani Solani

About a year ago, I discovered a story on a website I had never heard of. It kept me on the edge of my seat even more than the first season of Stranger Things. It took me more than an hour to read it – I did it on my phone and I didn’t mind scrolling several times to find out more about a Facebook impostor and the havoc he had wreaked in the lives of a Mumbai-based couple. The platform I read it on, The Ken, produces original, long-form, and extremely well-researched stories on technology, business, science and healthcare in India – subjects I wouldn’t normally be interested in. But when the Bengaluru-based digital news publisher went from a model that gave you these stories to read for free to one that required you to sign up and pay for the same – I found myself paying ₹2,750 for a one-year subscription. When my father learnt about it, he expressed surprise at the fact that I was willing to pay a four-digit number to read news features, something for which he has paid marginal amounts through his life. And that got me thinking – are folks my age (I’m 30) increasingly paying for quality digital content? Instead of watching free but terrible quality pirated content, and being satiated with peanut-costing but possibly compromised digital content?

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