News Broadcasting
Pradesh18.com foresees growth in female audience share
MUMBAI: Network18’s local news portal Pradesh18.com has seen a rapid growth in its user base. The digital destination claims to have more than 10 million unique users in last month and focuses on state-wise news in various regional languages such as Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Urdu. More languages are to be added such as Kannada, Tamil and Malayalam.
The primary growth of Pradesh18.com has come from its Hindi language portal.
As a changing trend, a lot of content is being consumed through mobile devices and that has added to the growth of the portal facilitating any content, anywhere. Complementary to major growth coming from mobile medium, 74 per cent of its audience are young readers below the age of 34 while 26 per cent are above the age of 40. Though the audience is fairly dominated by males but female share is growing and is at 17 per cent as per October numbers.
Network18 Digital CEO Manish Maheshwari attributes the success of Pradesh18.com to the product’s unique & single minded proposition to cater to the news & happenings of reader’s locality, district, city and state. He said, “Pradesh18.com is a platform to provide news at district level to its readers & in the language in which one prefers. We aspire to cover India inch by inch. Digital growth will come from vernacular languages and through mobile medium and Pradesh18.com is uniquely poised to benefit from both these factors.”
Pradesh18.com also contains high quality video news content and live TV content of popular ETV channels in respective states of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Rajasthan and Haryana.
News Broadcasting
News TV viewership jumps 33 per cent as West Asia war draws audiences
BARC Week 8 data shows news share rising to 8 per cent despite T20 World Cup
NEW DELHI: Even as individual television news channel ratings remain under a temporary pause, the genre itself is seeing a clear surge in audience attention.
According to the latest data from Broadcast Audience Research Council India, television news recorded a 33 per cent jump in genre share in Week 8 of 2026, covering February 28 to March 6.
The news genre accounted for 8 per cent of total television viewership during the week, up from 6 per cent the previous week. The spike in attention coincided with escalating geopolitical tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran, which have kept global headlines firmly fixed on West Asia.
The rise is notable because it came at a time when cricket was dominating television screens. The high-stakes stages of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup, including the Super 8 fixtures and semi-finals, were being broadcast during the same period.
Despite the cricket frenzy, viewers appeared to be toggling between sport and global affairs, boosting the overall share of news programming.
The surge in genre share comes even as the government has enforced a one-month pause on publishing ratings for individual news channels. The move followed regulatory scrutiny of the television ratings ecosystem.
While channel-level rankings remain temporarily out of sight, the genre-level data suggests that when global tensions escalate, audiences continue to turn to television news for real-time updates.
