The Hindu, one of India’s leading news publishers, is using product thinking to change how it connects with its users and drives digital revenue. At Wan-Ifra’s Digital Media India conference in Chennai, their chief product officer explained how they are using games, webinars, and AI summaries to keep readers engaged and coming back.
“Product thinking is what transforms great ideas into sustainable and lasting businesses,” Pundi S Sriram, chief product officer at The Hindu Group, told participants at the conference.
To explain what he meant, Sriram gave the example of The New York Times’ bundle strategy. Last year, 66% of NYT subscribers chose a bundle that included non-news products.
“Although news is still the core of what they do, non-news products have become a big part of their offering. The interesting thing is that 100% of these products didn’t exist 13 years ago,” he said.
Product thinking made all the difference – it’s about understanding user needs, the audience, the business model, and how they all connect from both a content and product angle.
“Our core product is journalism. And the product team should work with journalists to help build a solid news product,” Sriram said.
NaaS: News as a service
“News is a different kind of product. One of the key things we need to show is recurring value,” he said. That’s true, because subscribers only stick around if they keep seeing value in the product. And that takes more than just putting up a paywall.
Ten years ago, most digital businesses made money by selling ad space.
“We put content out there, hoped it reached users, and then monetized those users through ads. Then we slapped a paywall on the content,” Sriram said.
This model, which he calls monetization without transformation, was not sustainable.
“If you just slap a paywall on your content, you’ll get loyal subscribers who know and like your brand – they’ll pay,” Sriram said.
But the future lies in thinking of news as a service. To do this, publishers need to be user-focused, become part of users’ daily habits, and keep staying relevant.
For instance, Adobe shifted from selling tools on CDs to offering an online, constantly updated service with cloud storage and collaboration features that keep users engaged. Rolls-Royce moved from selling engines to “power by the hour,” charging customers based on engine use and guaranteeing performance through a global maintenance network.
“These examples show that we need to make big changes like this too,” he said.
Using games as a retention tool
One of the things The Hindu is focusing on is building habits for its readers. To help with this, the publisher introduced personalized notifications in their app.
“Once we did this, there was almost a 25 percent uptick in page views from personalised notifications for every user, thanks to our personalization engine,” Sriram said.
Last month, The Hindu introduced games to their app as an experiment to see if it could help retain users. There’s a loyal crossword audience, but it’s niche.
“We are seeing a lot of initial success,” Sriram said. In the first two weeks after launch, game consumption on the app went up by about 35 percent.
“We are hoping this will drive engagement with our subscribers,” he said.
However, he clarified that they are not looking at games as a way to make money. “We are looking at it as a retention tool.”
What’s next: Audio explainers and deep dives
The Hindu’s editorial content is something a lot of people regularly read or listen to. But for some users, the content can be quite complex, according to Sriram.
The product team is working on AI-generated audio explainers to break things down and make it easier to understand. The idea is to give users a quick, accessible way to understand the editorial.
This is also part of how The Hindu aims to show recurring value for its users.
“It’s actually not that hard to acquire users. It’s much, much harder to retain subscribers,” Sriram said.
One of the initiatives The Hindu is working on is creating deep-dive content. These first appear as e-books within the app, covering topics that users deeply care about.
The team is planning to release them regularly – once a month for now, and soon twice a month. “We’re finding great outcome for this,” he said.
Topical webinars are also doing great for The Hindu, in terms of engagement.
“If a user registers for a webinar – even if they don’t actually attend – we’ve found their engagement on our site goes up 3x afterward. Just signing up has that much impact, which is insane,” Sriram said.
Making news easier to explore
Another thing The Hindu is working on is adaptive content – basically letting users access stories in different ways.
One way is through Shorts – snippets that summarise their long-form articles. Since users like to sample a lot of long-form content, these snippets help them decide whether to read the full story.
They also use AI to create quick summaries and even highlight the key questions an article answer.
“We’re calling this feature FAQs for now,” Sriram said.
By mixing Shorts, AI summaries, and AI-powered Q&A, they’re aiming to boost user engagement and make the experience way more interactive.
First published on Wan-Ifra on 7 July, 2025. Republished with permission.
