IRS 2012 Q1: Digital grows at 47% CAGR, print in trouble

That’s the big story for marketers from the Indian Readership Survey for Q1, 2012. The survey is conducted for the Media Research Users Council (MRUC)

by Hansa Research and is the research tool relied on by marketers in the country to understand media consumption in India.

In a nutshell, digital is a great story and the Cable & Satellite story is a good one too, clipping along at 12.4 percent.

Here’s a snapshot of the growth in media consumption over the last three measurement periods of the IRS:

But the truly big story in the IRS is the state of the newspaper industry. While, overall, consumption of press has shown a 1.3 percent CAGR (see table), a look at the performance of the top ten newspapers in the country will worry newspaper owners.

This is what the readership numbers look like:

Overall, the top ten newspapers in India have de-grown by 0.003 percent. Of the ten publications, seven have registered negative growth, while those who have shown growth have done so in fractions of one percent.

What is notable is that the negative growth or stagnation is not limited to English language newspapers. Indeed, only one of the top ten publications – The Times of India – is published in English.

While newspaper owners have a lot of thinking to do to arrest the decline, digital publishers have a lot to celebrate in the 47 percent CAGR. The 12.4 percent growth in C&S, too, is heartening as this is a figure which is likely to keep rising as the country shifts from analog to digital.