Digital publishing is the business of writing news and articles and publishing them on websites and apps, together with the software that newsrooms use to write, sell and deliver them. It covers news websites and news apps, and also sites that cover one subject, such as cricket or personal finance.
Here is a typical morning. You open three news apps on your phone in Nagpur. All three show the same story about the monsoon forecast, word for word, with the same agency's name at the end. That story came from a news agency, a company that gathers news and sells it to newsrooms by subscription. Press Trust of India (PTI) is the best-known Indian agency.
Each newsroom receives the agency's story in its newsroom CMS. A CMS, or content management system, is the software in which reporters and editors write, edit and publish stories. An editor adds a headline and a photo, and publishes the story to the website, the app and social media at the same moment. A website caching tool then keeps a ready-made copy of the page, so that it opens quickly for every reader.
Most readers do not open a news site directly. They arrive from a search engine or a social media feed. This is now changing. Search engines often answer a question with an AI summary at the top, so the reader may never visit the page. This is called zero-click search.
When you open the page, ads load beside the story. A digital news publisher earns mainly from these ads. Software called a supply-side platform (SSP) sells each ad space on the page, in a fraction of a second, to the advertiser who bids the most. More and more, the ad is chosen by what the page is about, not by who is reading it. This is called contextual advertising.
After a few free articles in a month, a box may ask you to subscribe. That box belongs to the paywall and subscriptions software. It also handles the sign-up, the payment and every renewal.
Not every publisher earns in this way. A niche news site covers one subject in depth, for readers whom certain advertisers want to reach. An affiliate comparison website compares credit cards or loans, and earns a commission when a reader applies for one through its link.
The newest change is AI. Companies that build AI models now pay publishers for the right to use their articles. This is called AI content licensing. New AI content pricing tools try to work out what each article is worth. Most newsrooms buy all of this software from other companies, instead of building it themselves.