Digital journalism start ups could be news aggregators for profit such as InShorts in English and DailyHunt in Hindi and other languages. There are outlets for not-for-profit such as The Wire and Khabar. Apart from aggregators, there are content-based outlets for profit such as The Quint and Scroll. Content-based outlets face direct competition from established legacy titles such as The Times of India, NDTV, Dainik Bhaskar and many others. Aggregators do not face such head-on competition. Their focus is on mobile apps which supplement media organisations own contact with the users. They may face competition from global technology firms. All these news outlets face real competition from the dominant social media firms such as Facebook and technology firms such as Google in respect of audiences and revenues. Their target audiences are decided by the kind of journalism they practise. The Wire is about opinion and comment. The Quint has the young mobile audience as its target. DailyHunt focuses on Indian languages.

All these outlets are heavily dependent on advertising. Digital outlets  practise ‘users first, profits later’ path. It takes anywhere between five to seven years to break even.