The parent company of online news aggregator Dailyhunt and short-video platform Josh, VerSe Innovation, has acquired New York based digital magazine store, Magzter, a cross-platform global digital newsstand with a library of over 8,500 premium magazines and newspapers.
The deal is a cash and stock transaction and it marks VerSe’s entry into premium content. “This acquisition is part of the company’s efforts to diversify Dailyhunt’s revenue streams from a pure advertising-driven model to include digital subscriptions. It is the first global acquisition for the firm, although the deal size was not disclosed,” Moneycontrol reported. Through this acquisition, users will have access to publications available on Magzter such as Forbes, Time, The Economist, Vogue, Elle, Vanity Fair, Reader’s Digest, Cosmopolitan, New Yorker and Bazaar.
Dailyhunt also launched a subscription-based offering Dailyhunt Premium that would offer users access to content from international publishers in over 60 languages from Magzter. Subscribers will also get access to an ad-free experience across the Dailyhunt application.
Dailyhunt was founded by former managing director of Facebook India Umang Bedi and Virendra Gupta. The deal will be closed on April 30 and Bedi added that Magzter’s 75 employees will be fully integrated with VerSe Innovation’s 1,200 workforce.
Through this acquisition, Dailyhunt also aims to attract users from India’s elite and aspirational upper-middle-class demographic to its application, as part of the company’s increasing focus on monetisable users, Moneycontrol reported. Dailyhunt currently has over 350 million monthly active users (MAUs), of which 250 million are on the Dailyhunt app and the remaining 100 million on its website. People who use the app on a daily basis spend about 30 minutes each day, the company said.