Beating ET: Unboxing Mint's defiance of online media

Mint, HT Media's business offering, was struggling on the digital front until 2018—industry leader ET entertained over 5X visitors Mint did. Today, the tables have turned, with Mint getting a good 9 million visitors over ET. But it's been a bizarre, unconventional journey here

In January 2019, Mint changed its focus completely to mobile and launched an unusual new website

Content strategy and tech were overhauled

There were risks: desktop was ignored and some questionable design choices were made. But they paid off, with more visitors and better ad rates

The team that led Mint 2.0 is no longer with the company, highly unusual considering the business news site’s success

If there were 10 commandments to run a news website, this one would figure in the top three—Do Not Let Thy Precious Back Button Exit Thy Page. And yet, livemint.com, the website of media giant HT Media Ltd-owned business media publication Mint, did just that.

This back-button-exit-forever move was implemented as part of a complete website redesign on 20 January 2019. Other drastic changes included a single endless scroll of news stories, a blinkers-on focus on mobile readership, a discomfiting desktop experience akin to mobile, and, apparently, a focus on “personalised” news—all done to unseat its long-reigning competitor, The Economic Times (ET)*.

AUTHOR

Shreedhar Manek

Based in Bangalore, Shreedhar is a Staff Writer for The Ken. He writes on technology, education, human resources and urban mobility. He has a BTech in Computer Science and an MS in Urban Sociology from IIIT Hyderabad.

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