Magzter is a digital magazine store and newsstand which is redefining the way magazines are read globally

POORNIMA KAVLEKAR

Girish Ramdas used to run two companies prior to starting up Magzter; They were Galatta Cinema, a South Indian film industry magazine and Dot Com Infoway, an IT services companies that built mobile aps and web products for clients abroad. With Magzter, he simply combined the know-how from these two different companies, infused a dose of scalability into the business model and decided to think big. He decided to launch a product that would make it very easy for magazine owners to get a tablet app.

In 2011, he launched with a bang. From day-one, he thought big and opened his headquarters in New York City, right in the middle of the world’s publishing capital, amidst New York Times and Conde Nast. Today, with 26 million users and 6,500 magazines from over 50 countries, Magzter has disrupted the entire print publishing business across the World. With total funding to the tune of US $13 million from Kalaari Capital and SPH Media, Singapore, the company has expanded well and garnered a wide user base.

It has created a proprietary technology called OREY Click Publishing, which has helped publishers all over the world to go digital in a short span of time. It has also recently integrated its system with Snapdeal.com where Magzter enables magazines as a category for large format e-commerce portals and with a business model to jointly monetize the content.

Collaborate to gain: It co-opted with Apple and Google platforms to sell digital magazines instead of fighting against them. This was a huge differentiator and benefitted the company by getting millions of new users without spending any marketing dollars. 

Aid student community: The company has enabled free magazine reading in IITs and IIMs as part of a pilot program to give the students access to global top class content from all over the world.