This January, MediaNama held an open house discussion on the future of indic languages online. This is Part 1 of our coverage of the discussion. English has been the medium of most communications on the Indian Internet, even though the vast majority of Indians don't speak it as their first language. Thanks to falling data rates in the aftermath of Jio, Internet penetration rates are growing rapidly. As newer audiences seek content in their own languages, what are advertisers doing to keep up? Or rather, are they doing enough in the first place? Why isn't there enough indic language advertising online? As indic language content, like Hindi-language news sites and websites in regional languages are created everyday, advertising doesn't seem to have kept up at the same pace. Why are advertisers hesitant to target a rapidly growing audience in local Indian languages? Anurag Gupta, founder and MD of DGM India (now CEO of SVG Columbus) said, "I have been hearing that the next big thing is going to be the regional languages. This has been happening for the 10 years while Internet has become big, mobile Internet has become big -- but honestly I don't think indic languages even constitute a percentage point of the total digital advertising spend. I think the one single bottleneck is that publishers and intermediaries have made it easy for advertisers to reach the local language audience in English. So they don't want to take any risk -- why should they make any effort? I can…
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