By Aultrin Vijay
“I’ll be very blunt. Sakal’s subscription journey was an accident,” Swapnil Malpathak, Business Head, Sakal Digital told the audience during our Digital Media India conference in Chennai.
Malpathak is responsible for digital transformation at Sakal, a media company that runs four Marathi newspapers (including its main title, Sakal), two TV channels, and eight websites – six in Marathi and two in English. Together, they reach about 15 million readers in Maharashtra and among the Marathi-speaking diaspora.
“We were very scared to go behind subscription. We didn’t know whether our audience will buy our subscription initially,” Malpathak said.
Malpathak took over Sakal’s digital operations five years ago, when there was no clear digital business strategy in place.
“We began with just one person in the digital team – me,” he said. Today, the team has grown to 140 people managing eight websites.
Focus on one KPI and prioritise content creation
Malpathak outlined three key points for Sakal’s subscription journey:
No guaranteed successFocus on one main KPI to keep things simplePrioritise content creation while outsourcing tech needs
Frictionless sign-in experience
The first step they took was moving their old systems to Quintype.
“This instantly cut our tech costs by almost 60%. That cost saving gave me the push to kickstart Sakal’s digital journey,” Malpathak said.
Sakal consolidated all of its five Marathi websites onto eSakal.com to reduce costs and simplify the subscription system by managing it on a single domain.
Now, visitors to any of their sites are prompted to log in or sign up after reading four articles – but they are not immediately asked to pay.
When collecting logins and customer data, choosing the right platform is crucial, Malpathak said. He emphasised the importance of designing a simple, frictionless user experience.
Pay-per-article and other early experiments ‘failed horribly’
One of their early experiments was pay-per-article with Singapore-based Fewcents.
But that experiment “failed horribly and miserably,” Malpathak said. No one paid, and it had minimal impact on traffic.
They moved on to the traditional ad-based approach and bundled digital subscriptions with print. However, vendors and readers pushed back, as they didn’t see the need to pay extra for digital.
Newspaper distributors threatened to stop delivering Sakal, blaming digital subscriptions for hurting their livelihood. Thus, that experiment was paused.
Meanwhile, Sakal ran website surveys to better understand their readers, while other experiments kept failing.
“We found that Marathi audiences wanted more personal finance content – a gap nobody was filling,” Malpathak said.
“Fortunately, we had Sakal Money, a popular Marathi personal finance magazine. We began experimenting with its well-researched, long-form print content.”
Since the team lacked dedicated staff, they used print content as premium material, branding it as Sakal Plus.
“We incorporated content from Sakal Money into this web-based subscription. After two to three months, it became clear that sales were low,” Malpathak said.
Ten award-winning journalists were dedicated solely to the premium content vertical. However, despite these efforts, premium web content still isn’t selling well.
Goal: Increase unlock rate by 30 percent
Over time, Sakal identified a single, impactful metric for both business and editorial teams: the unlock rate. This measures which content or e-paper led a user to subscribe.
Editorial teams were assigned this KPI, shifting focus from traditional metrics such as page views to actual content performance in driving subscriptions.
The goal was to increase the unlock rate by 30 percent annually.
At first, the team offered a bundled e-paper subscription that included four titles for the same price. However, most users were only reading one. This led to the introduction of individual subscriptions, each targeting its own distinct audience.
They also discovered that subscriptions would spike during the first week of going live, but quickly decline afterward.
“The marketing campaigns need to go live after a week of the launch, and this needs to be marketed like an FMCG product. You need to have a sizeable marketing budget for this,” Malpathak said.
Traditionally, legacy newspapers rely on brand reputation alone, but Malpathak said digital subscriptions are an extension of the brand and need separate marketing efforts.
25,000 paid subscribers in 16 months
Next, Malpathak borrowed a tactic from the print subscription model – offering freebies.
Since the newspaper already had a large stock of FMCG items through barter deals, instead of offering discounts, they maintained the subscription price and added free gifts equivalent to the value to the subscription.
They also offered free concert passes with subscriptions at no extra cost.
This strategy worked well, and within 16 months, they have reached 25,000 paying subscribers, with strong revenue from monthly plans priced at Rs 450 ($5.2).
New subscription product born out of protest
An incident in Pune highlighted the massive interest in civil services exams – around 40,000 aspirants gathered at one location within half an hour, causing widespread traffic disruption.
This made Malpathak realise the size of the potential audience. They found that 1.5 million students from Maharashtra appear for civil services exams each year.
At the time, only Indian Express and The Hindu catered to this segment in English. There was a gap in Marathi-language content.
In response, on June 1, the team launched Sakal Study Room, a Marathi subscription-based e-paper tailored for civil services aspirants.
They partnered with Dnyandeep, Pune’s largest civil services academy, which pays a monthly fee to have its branding on the e-paper. In addition to this partnership revenue, Sakal also earns from subscriptions.
“In the first 10 days, without any marketing, we sold 450 subscriptions organically, just through a soft launch. Once we begin full-scale marketing, this has the potential to be a real game changer,” Malpathak said.
Educating the audience to pay for subscriptions
Maharashtra is a very conservative market, and one where it is difficult to get people to pay for subscriptions.
Currently, the focus is on building awareness, since paying for news is still a new concept for many in India.
The primary product is the e-paper, offered in monthly, annual, and three-year subscriptions. Most customers opt for monthly plans due to concerns about auto-debit, especially among senior citizens wary after various scams and credit card frauds.
Even after gaining some success, monthly subscriptions still dominate, resulting in high churn and requiring the team to continuously encourage readers to renew each month.
About 60% of users continue their subscriptions even after the initial offer ends – a strong retention rate in this context.
Setbacks are expected, but the risks are manageable. In digital, costs are relatively low, so even if there’s a loss of Rs 10 lakh ($11,700), a single Rs 15 lakh ($17,500) print ad can offset it.
E-paper key growth driver
The e-paper remains the main product driving subscriptions for Sakal.
They adopted a hybrid model for their e-papers, combining ads and subscriptions, without promising users an ad-free experience. This approach proved successful.
The team is also exploring AI tools that can turn news summaries into short-form videos, which may better suit younger audiences.
Their insight: a subscription model doesn’t need to mirror competitors. What worked for them was the e-paper, but others might need a completely different approach based on their own audience. The only way to understand those needs is through continuous experimentation.
Catch Swapnil Malpathak’s full session from DMI on Knowledge Hub