MUMBAI: You gotta hand it to the debutant Republic TV headed by the aggressive and hyper-on-steroids Arnab Goswami. He, along with the team led by Vikas Khanchandani, seems to be sparing no effort to reinforce the perception that the channel is on course to leadership in the English news channel space.

Starting with dual and multiple placement of his channel on various LCNs on cable TV networks, to now claiming that he is beating all and sundry on Twitter – he and the team at Republic TV are clearly flogging their horses hard.

According to Twitter listening data provided to indiantelevision.com by Opalina Technologies, Republic TV claims that it has managed to generate three times more conversation (aggregated volume for on air hashtags) than English news market leader Times Now on Twitter between 6 and 12 May 2017.

Opalina further explains that Republic has roughly three per cent of the followers as compared to Times Now (241,000 followers as compared to Times Now’s 7.4 million). However, Republic generated 261,000 tweets from its viewers in the period as compared to Times Now’s 86,000 which translates into 1.21 tweets per Republic Twitter follower as compared to .01 tweets per Times Now Twitter follower.

Amongst the hashtags Opalina says that worked are:

#akhileshinsultsmartyrs, #arvindgate, #arvindgate, #endtripletalaq,
#gandhipapers, #indiawithkulbhushan, #iskejricorrupt, #lalutapeexposed, #nototripletalaq, #republicstingslashkar, #sunandamurdertapes, #traitorzakirbanned and #zakirconversionfactory.

"We have provided this authenticated and verifiable granular data (breakdown) confirmed by three independent sources," Opalina co-founder Gaurav Sharma told indiantelevision.com. "The data is in the public domain -- which we extracted and summarised," he said. To a question, Sharma said, "We would stand by our data and ready to discuss with anybody who would dispute this data set."

Now in the battle which is steaming up in the English news channel genre, one wonders which is the next parameter the channels will resort to assert their supremacy: the number of guests per night on prime time?

“Who knows,” says a long-time news television observer. “News TV has changed its complexion in India and it’s like in no other nation.”