Deepak Bhatt likes to tell the story of how an issue of GQ featuring K-pop group BTS didn’t at first generate much interest, but went on to become a K-pop “collectible” after appearing on Amazon.
“We had to pull copies from across the country, request a reprint and then print the issue again when the additional copies also sold out,” Bhatt, who is assistant vice president for sales & distribution at India Today, told WAN-Ifra’s Indian Printers Summit in Pune.
The issue went through two reprints, and went on to become the number-one seller in Amazon’s books category, “prompting the platform to ask why a magazine was topping a list of books,” said Bhatt (pictured), who oversees distribution across multiple magazine brands at India Today, this showed that publishers can distribute widely and still miss where demand exists.
“We know what the magazine contains, how it is printed, and where it is sold. But we don’t know who is reading it,” he said. Since the GQ experience, India Today has been building its distribution model around consumer behaviour, using online marketplaces, quick-commerce platforms and print-on-demand to reach readers beyond traditional retail networks. The model has helped consumer revenue reach around 50 per cent of the company’s magazine business, with circulation earnings exceeding advertising for some brands.
Bhatt compared magazine subscriptions with milk delivery. Consumers can now use apps to select delivery days, pause orders and restart them when needed. However, newspaper and magazine subscriptions have largely retained older delivery models.
The publisher’s preferred distribution channel may not be the reader’s preferred purchasing channel. Readers should be able to choose whether to buy a magazine from a vendor, a retailer or Amazon, he said.
E-commerce has allowed India Today to sell magazines in towns where copies are not regularly distributed. The publisher can now reach readers in 3,000 towns without having to send copies to each location in advance. India Today has also changed how its magazines are presented online. Listings include details about stories and topics, while readers are encouraged to leave reviews. Copies carry information inviting buyers to subscribe after trying an individual issue, the aim being to make a magazine easier to evaluate before purchase and to convert one-time buyers into regular customers.
However, online access comes at a price: For an India Today issue priced at Rs 100 (A$1.51), Amazon charges Rs 25 (A$0.38 cents) in delivery fees. Delivery can take one to four days, making the channel less suitable for readers who want a magazine immediately.
Meanwhile, quick commerce offers a different proposition. Through Blinkit, a quick commerce platform, India Today has made around 50–70 magazine titles available across 107 cities, with deliveries taking about ten minutes. Bhatt said the channel now moves more than 30,000 copies a month.
But there are operational challenges, he said. Each magazine issue needs its own stock-keeping unit (SKU), and publication dates differ across cities. For a business handling dozens of brands, keeping inventory updated across multiple locations requires close coordination between publishers and the platform.
Returns are an even bigger problem. The cost of bringing unsold copies back has doubled and now exceeds the cost of servicing the channel itself, Bhatt said. To address that, India Today and Blinkit have been exploring whether some inventory could instead be used for targeted sampling.
By identifying groups of consumers through their purchasing patterns, they can offer magazines to potential readers and attempt to convert them into repeat buyers. It is an effort to make the platform useful not just for immediate sales, but also for finding new audiences, he said.
For readers abroad, a third channel addresses a different constraint – the cost of reaching international readers. The company launched international print-on-demand distribution in May 2025 using Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing infrastructure. Readers in participating countries can order a magazine online; Amazon prints and delivers it locally, while India Today receives a royalty. The service covers around 13 countries, with delivery taking approximately three days. Its intended audiences include the Indian diaspora, students and professionals abroad, and existing readers who prefer print to digital editions.
Bhatt says data from each of these channels helps India Today understand its readers and their preferences: “India Today has developed titles that are entirely content-driven, with advertising treated as additional revenue,” he said.
The model is not without trade-offs. E-commerce adds delivery costs; quick commerce brings inventory and returns problems; and print-on-demand depends on the economics of local production. Reaching more readers does not automatically mean making more money.
For India Today, the task is to grow magazine sales while keeping distribution costs under control: “The future winner will not be the publisher with the widest retail or distribution network, but the publisher which is closest to the reader,” he said.
WAN-Ifra/Aultrin Vijay with thanks