By Ruchi Sharma
A look at NewsDrum’s four-year run, its key editorial breaks, bootstrapped model, audience profile and the questions around its next phase of growth
India has too many news websites. It also has too few trustworthy ones. Somewhere in that contradiction, a small Delhi-based newsroom is trying to build a business.
NewsDrum, the general news platform owned by BMI Group, is in its fourth year of operations. By the standards of Indian digital media, four years is not a long time.
By the standards of independent, bootstrapped journalism in a market where well-funded startups have folded quietly and legacy brands have compromised loudly, NewsDrum appears to be on a relatively strong footing.
The platform was founded by Niraj Sharma, a former television journalist who built his reputation fighting for the credibility of the news media while running BestMediaInfo and BuzzInContent.
In Sharma’s words, NewsDrum is an attempt to take that editorial discipline into the general news space. The attempt has produced some genuine moments of impact, alongside some questions that Sharma and his team are still grappling with.
The platform’s recent claim to fame was a high-profile exclusive report about Hiren Joshi’s changing influence within the Prime Minister’s Office, which was followed by mainstream newspapers, including Dainik Bhaskar, across print and online editions.
In April 2022, weeks after launch, NewsDrum published an investigation into how several Indian satellite news channels were broadcasting unverified claims of an imminent Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine, using inflammatory language and misquoting international agencies.
The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting issued an advisory to all news channels within three days. For a newly launched platform with no established readership to trigger a government response so quickly was significant.
In July 2024, Hindenburg Research cited NewsDrum among 40 global media references in its response to a SEBI show-cause notice, placing it alongside The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times and The Guardian.
Shortly after, a NewsDrum investigation into Wikipedia edits on Indian news channel pages led to the removal of a “Modi-aligned media” tag from entries for Aaj Tak, India TV and CNN-News18, a story subsequently picked up by ABP Live.
Outlining the platform’s editorial standards, Sharma said, “We are among the few news outlets in India that categorically reject toxicity and accord equal weight to all perspectives. We do not tolerate targeting individuals or communities, mudslinging or slander. Upholding these principles has earned us our readers’ confidence.”
That confidence, he says, now translates into three to five million monthly page views, a figure he attributed to Google Analytics.
Despite an active presence on social media platforms, the platform has a comparatively small but loyal base of followers.
A cursory look at its social media handles shows breaking news-style quick posts on X, quirky viral-worthy reels on Instagram and business news-focused posts on LinkedIn.
According to Sharma, over 70% of NewsDrum’s users are aged between 18 and 44, concentrated in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad. It is the same commercially attractive demographic that every major digital news platform in India is chasing with far greater resources.
That resource gap is the central reality of NewsDrum’s competitive position.
The platform runs a news desk of around 37 editors and a small reporting team across all verticals, English and Hindi.
The original investigative work that has earned NewsDrum its most meaningful recognition represents a fraction of what the platform publishes on any given day.
The platform is fully bootstrapped by BMI Group, with advertising and branded content as its primary revenue streams. No venture capital, no private equity. In principle, that independence protects editorial decision-making.
In practice, it also limits how quickly the newsroom can grow its original reporting capacity, hire specialised correspondents or invest in the kind of sustained investigative infrastructure that producing more than occasional landmark stories would require.
NewsDrum has also invested in technology to stretch its lean team further, launching in-house AI-led tools in 2024.
None of this makes NewsDrum’s achievements less real. It places them in clearer context. A bootstrapped newsroom of 50 people producing work that Hindenburg cites and that moves the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting is a legitimate story about what focused, editorially disciplined journalism can accomplish without scale or funding.
When asked about scalability concerns, Sharma said multiple technology partners, AI firms and social media agencies have partnered with the platform to ensure sustainable organic growth.
It is also an incomplete story, one that will only be fully told by what NewsDrum does in the years ahead, when the early momentum has settled and the harder work of sustaining both quality and commercial viability begins in earnest.
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