The Indian national daily has streamlined ad placement in its five print editions using Méthode’s multi-edition management
The Hindustan Times is India’s second English-language daily with a circulation of nearly one million print copies produced in five regional editions. The paper’s content is also published through a web edition, five regional e-papers and apps for smartphone and tablets. The paper is produced by around 900 editorial staff distributed between the Hindustan Times’s main newsroom in New Delhi and its offices in major cities throughout northern India.
The five regional editions of the Hindustan Times differ in advertising content as well as editorial. Ad content is subject to last-minute arrivals and changes up to a few minutes before editions close.
Managing this complex edition structure in real time was not easy using the existing platform, comprising half a dozen separate systems from news planning to edition management.
The solution replaced all existing systems with a single Méthode CMS for news publishing, handling all editorial functions.
Advertising content is paginated in the same pages as the local editorial, increasing the speed and accuracy of individual edition building. Over 1000 ads are paginated each day, most of them using Méthode’s automatic ‘smart placement’ mechanisms.
The SAP system, used to manage advertising bookings and payments, has been tightly integrated with Méthode in real time – ads booked through the SAP system show up seconds later on the page.
As part of the same deployment, the paper’s online editions benefitted from the hosting of its web servers in a cloud installation managed by Amazon Web Services, allowing server capacity to be ramped up and down automatically to keep up with visitor numbers.
Rapid ad placement and update: Close integration with the ad booking system allows bookings to be modified and updated until the last minute before the edition closes. During recent busy periods the system has handled over 10,000 updates a day with complete visibility and control over the whole process.
Dynamic web scaling: Peaks in the paper’s large online readership (10 million unique visitors) are handled by dynamically scaling server capacity in the cloud, avoiding investments in server hardware which would go unused much of the time.