Performance of Indian Newspaper Websites During COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic made an indelible impact on the world. This impact was clearly apparent in the media, namely the thousands of newspapers published daily, and resulted in an increased shift of readership of newspapers from print to electronic due to fear of becoming infected from print copies. As such, this study aimed to reveal the performance of Indian English newspaper websites in terms of ranking, bounce rate, page views, global reach and time on website before and after the COVID-19 period. The top-eight English newspapers published in India were considered for the study. The Uniform Resource Locators (URLs) of the websites of these newspapers were searched through Alexa Internet. The data was gathered for a period of 364 days, breaking the time taken for the study into before and after the COVID-19 period to uncover the influence of COVID-19 on the ranking and other aspects related to the usage of these websites. The whole data was analyzed with the help of Microsoft Excel and Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS). The study reveals that Indian English newspaper websites did manage to attract global audiences during the COVID-19 period and improved their ranking vis-a-vis gain in global reach, bounce rate and page views during this period when compared with the time period before the COVID-19 situation worsened. This research is significant as no such research has been carried out so far into the impact of COVID-19 on Indian English newspaper websites, and has relevance for newspaper publishers, policymakers, world media and international scholars. Further, the paper throws light on the influence of the pandemic on the usage of Indian newspaper websites, which is quite useful to understand the changing information-seeking behavior of users since the advent of the Internet.