Walt Disney APAC President and Star & Disney India chair Uday Shankar said that the media industry had done itself no favours by relying disproportionately on ad revenue over the last few years. "The biggest pain of the industry, for print, TV, and digital, is disproportionate dependence on advertising. Advertising revenue in the 2000s used to be about a billion dollars, and now it is ten billion dollars," Shankar said at FICCI e-FRAMES 2020's inaugural session. "It has helped us grow, but it has been a bit of a distraction. Globally, the industry has grown, through a system where consumers pay," Shankar pointed out. Interestingly, Hotstar, which Disney owns, is one of the biggest examples of this phenomenon. In April, Disney disclosed that Hotstar (now renamed Disney+ Hotstar) has 8 million paying subscribers, which is a small fraction of what it claims are over 300 million monthly unique users. "All of us are guilty of this," Shankar said. "We decided to be shortsighted and subsidise our products, to create hurdles for smaller challengers. That has become a very big setback for the industry. If the industry has to grow, what has to be fixed is our ability to get people to pay for what they consume. That's fair, and that's the only way we can grow." In an interview with ET Now, Shankar reportedly said that Hotstar was looking to get "tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions" of paying subscribers in the future. We will be hurt badly…
