About Sandeep Amar

Founder, PDLab · Former CEO, Indian Express Digital & Zee Digital

I have spent twenty years building digital businesses in India, from the inside. I have been a marketing head, a CMO, a CEO, a founder, and an author. I have grown audiences from millions to tens of millions, scaled revenues, built teams from scratch, exited a startup, and lost more than I have won. This page is the story of how I got here and what I am doing now.

The early years: Citigroup and the birth of digital in India

I cut my teeth in the early 2000s, leading the e-business desk at Citigroup in India. Banking was the first industry to take digital seriously, and that early exposure to digital strategy, online conversion, and analytics shaped everything I did afterwards. From Citigroup, I moved into media: first at The Times of India and Hindustan Times in their sales and marketing teams, then to Times Internet, where I led marketing, audience strategy, and sales as CMO.

Times Internet: learning the scale game

Times Internet was where I learned that digital is not a small business. It is a scale business. The difference between a 5-million-user property and a 50-million-user property is not effort, it is system design. Audience strategy, SEO, content velocity, page speed, ad ops, and product all need to compound together. This was the foundation for everything that came next.

India.com / Zee Digital: my first CEO role

I joined India.com (the Zee Entertainment and Penske Media JV) and was promoted to CEO. When I started, the property had 25 million monthly users and was ranked #8 among Indian digital publishers. By the time I left, we had grown to 80 million users a month, climbed to rank #2, and grew revenue 5x, from $2 million to $10 million in three years.

The growth was not from one big idea. It was from a hundred small ones: a relentless focus on SEO, page speed, content depth, monetization stack optimization, and team culture. The same playbook I now teach.

Indian Express Digital: from #7 to #3

I joined Indian Express Digital as CEO and was given a clear mission: catch up to the leaders. Within months, we moved from rank #7 to #3 and grew to 75 million monthly users. The Indian Express team was, and is, one of the finest journalism organizations in the country, and helping them win in digital was one of the most meaningful chapters of my career.

iTV Digital: building from zero

After Indian Express, I joined iTV Network as CEO of Digital, reporting to founder Kartikeya Sharma. The mandate was different: build, not scale. We launched video-first, multi-platform content properties under the iTV and NewsX brands.

Inaaj: founder, operator, exit

In parallel, I built Inaaj, a machine learning technology company for publishers. We built tools that helped news sites grow audience, increase engagement, and monetize better using ML. We sold the company in 2022.

PDLab: what I am doing now

PDLab (Publishers Digital Lab) is my current venture. We work with publishers globally on organic traffic growth, page speed, SEO, AEO, GEO, social media, and programmatic revenue. PDLab is the institutional version of everything I learned the hard way over twenty years.

Writing, speaking, teaching

I write books, articles, and blog posts. My publisher is Prabhat Prakashan and I have contributed to Exchange4media, afaqs!, Free Press Journal, and Medium. I speak at industry conferences: ad:tech, Digipub World, INMA South Asia, MMA Forum India, and others. And I teach: courses on SEO, AEO, and GEO on Graphy and Udemy.

The other side

Outside of business, I have practiced yoga and meditation for over twenty years. I read philosophy. I write about spirituality. I think the way you think is more important than what you know, and the way you think is shaped by what you do every day, not what you read once.

Credentials

MBA, Faculty of Management Studies (FMS), Delhi
Six Sigma Black Belt
Virginia Tech Fellow