Digital media policy of Uttar Pradesh revised: Death knell to legacy news TV?

Uttar Pradesh has released its Digital Media Policy 2024 via a government order. It is the first state that has come up with such a policy. From a first-off reading, the details are quite simple: social media is used to amplify and advertise the state government’s schemes and programmes. In a word, it is ‘advertising’.

But there is a more far-reaching implication of this policy for legacy news television.

Look at the details. The money will be spent on social media, which means YouTube, X, Instagram, Facebook and so on. There are payment slabs which will made according to the number of subscribers or views that a post might have. So far, none of this is very novel. Even newspapers get advertising rates according to the number of copies they circulate; the numbers vary in slabs, similar to the ones in UP’s digital media plan.

The policy says that payments up to Rs 8 lakh per month can be made, if conditions are met. The policy document lays out four categories for Facebook and Youtube for payments, split into A, with 10 lakh subscribers, B with 5 lakh, C with 2 lakh and D with 1 lakh.

With Instagram and X, the numbers will remain the same but the metric will be followers. For video content, the payments will range from Rs 5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh according to the category. For written content on Facebook, Instagram and X, the payments will range from Rs 10,000 to Rs 5,000 per post. Additionally, a YouTube channel can get up to Rs 1 lakh for each government advert and Rs 2 lakh to make one of their own.  

Now, all this can easily be seen as old wine in an old bottle: India has now been seeing social media being used very effectively for disseminating government advertising as well as political and ideological propaganda. It can also be seen as the UP CM preparing early for the electoral battle ahead in 2027, given the headwinds the BJP is facing in the state.

Impact on news television

So how is news TV linked to all this? To begin with, news TV is in an uncontrolled downward spiral as far as revenues are concerned. Costs are going up; digital media has crowded out the news market and is rapidly taking over the revenue streams that traditional TV depends on. This, again, is not a new situation. TV executives and C-suiters have been grappling with this situation for the last 15-odd years. Youtube channels have successfully challenged the existence of satellite and broadcast TV.

Now, this policy has gone a step beyond. Legacy TV news is already dependent on government revenues. This policy now sidesteps all of that and goes straight to the individual. The details in the order are very telling. These individual handles, pages or YouTube channels are going to be ‘empanelled’ in the same way legacy media is. This means a very simple thing: the state government will spend its money on measurable metrics instead of vague viewership numbers that TV gives by way of TRP.

The government will also be able to spend its money smartly by targeting geographies and demographics precisely, rather than spraying the information hoping it reaches the right people. For example, if there a scheme oriented for women in west UP, planners now have the option of choosing those digital influencers who have a hold over that demography and geography – exactly what traditional TV lacks.

The revised policy also empowers individual content creators who will cost much less than going through the standard route of ad agencies, in-house executives and expensive creatives. 

Now, if this same policy is replicated in other states, it will, in no uncertain terms, mean that the money will be diverted from legacy media, especially TV. With the tailspin that news TV is already in, this will create a virtual dead-end for most channels, particularly those which don’t have the backing of deep pockets.