Anandabazar.com Bags 1st prize at the Prestigious INMA Global Media Awards

by Shrutee K/DNS

Kolkata, 27th June; Anandabazar.com, the website entity for the iconic Bengali newspaper – Anandabazar Patrika, won its 1st INMA award at the 2018 Global Media Awards organized by International News Media Association (INMA) in the category of Best Brand Awareness Campaign for its much aspired property Ananda Utsav 2017.

Both the Bengali news websites, owned by ABP Pvt. Ltd., i.e. Anandabazar.com and Ebela.in, made a significant mark at the 2018 Global Media Awards. While Anandabazar.com won the coveted 1^st prize for the award category 'Best Brand Awareness Campaign', Ebela.in won itself a place as an honorable mention for the category 'Best Idea to Grow Digital Readership or Engagement'. Mr. D. D. Purkayastha, Managing Director and CEO of ABP Pvt Ltd, was delighted to receive the awards at the event. He said, “We are extremely proud to receive the awards for - Anandabazar.com and Ebela.in - Bengali assets from our Digital business. We have already begun preparing for a much larger, more engaging and vibrant Ananda Utsav 2018 and are certain that this will allow the website for Anandabazar.com to garner a large share of the global Bengali audience.”

Anandabazar.com won the award for excellent execution of the annual Ananda Utsav event – its one-stop microsite on Durga Puja which is a platform to connect the Bengali community all over the world. The 2017 edition was lauded by the jury at the Global award for delivering “Truly impressive revenue and awareness results during this campaign” and also for creating “A strong 360-degree campaign which creates an opportunity to deliver value to commercial partners and readers, through vibrant design which has delivered results.”

Mr. D.N. Mukerjea, President of ABP’s digital business was excited as this is the 1st INMA award for the business. He mentioned, “We believe digital is the future and we are constantly strengthening our position by investing in the newsroom, video capabilities, technology, product and audience development. “

ABP Pvt Ltd. not only dominates the Bengali news website category, but it has also been consistently increasing its market share. As per the April 2018 comScore data, Anandabazar.com gets 63 million page views and 3.85 million unique visitors, while Ebela.in gets 40 million page views and 1.2 million unique visitors. Between the two digital assets, ABP Pvt Ltd. owns almost 50% of the market, in terms of both page views and unique visitors. Thus ABP Pvt Ltd is way ahead of its competition and compares favourably with other vernacular leaders.

Apart from this formidable presence in the Bengali news space, ABP Pvt Ltd is also galvanising its hold over the English news market with properties like Telegraphindia.com, FortuneIndia.com and T2Online.com in its portfolio.

INMA has been hosting these awards for media excellence since 1937. The 2018 Global Media Awards were hosted in Washington. The competition garnered 830 entries from 220 media companies in 39 countries. Participants included newspaper houses, magazines, digital media, television and radio channels.  An international panel of 50 executives from 20 countries selected 195 finalists, and from those 40 first-place winners were unveiled across 20 categories.