Enshittification Of ET Prime

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Enshittification: The process where digital platforms and services gradually decline in quality as companies stop prioritizing users and instead focus on maximizing profits for themselves and their shareholders.

The term was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022.

In this post, I’m applying it to ET PRIME, the paid subscription of Economic Times, probably the second largest MSM business daily in the world (see footnote 1).

I’ve been a paid subscriber of ET Prime for many years.

For the first two years or so, I was very impressed with the value delivered by ET Prime in the form of special articles, clippings, search, etc.

But, of late, it has started sucking big time. Given below are six areas in which ET Prime has gotten “enshittified” in the recent past.

1. Newsletter

When I click the link to an article in its daily digest email newsletters, I don’t see the article on ET Prime’s website. Instead, I get the error message “HTTP Status 400 – Bad Request”.

As a workaround, I need to open the link in the Chrome Incognito Mode where the article opens fine, copy the URL of the page from the browser address bar, paste into address bar in the Chrome Normal Mode. Pain!

e.g.

Link in newsletter: https://nltrack.indiatimes.com/tracking/track/cl/native?param=06a7cd4c2743747794d4b8f676b33e33b91b9d5689f1668cf42da6aa8c60af9f04c95c8e726041a98b3db5920c00648db14a47dfa9846c419c1e8d7faafa0aadac75d89fdf9d02cb8eac38cce580eb97e191cdc6ef8e0d20&o=6a655c200b910053e814845d.

Link in Chrome Incognito Mode: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2026/jul/26/sunet-front/gen-z-gets-an-a/articleshow/132633389.cms?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=ETepaper_paid&utm_content=front-page&ncode=06a7cd4c2743747794d4b8f676b33e33b91b9d5689f1668cf42da6aa8c60af9f04c95c8e726041a98b3db5920c00648db14a47dfa9846c419c1e8d7faafa0aadac75d89fdf9d02cb8eac38cce580eb97e191cdc6ef8e0d20&nl_id=626bc2ad7ae3583e7033658f.

Link in Chrome Normal Mode: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/epaper/delhicapital/2026/jul/26/sunet-front/gen-z-gets-an-a/articleshow/132633389.cms.

This problem cannot be attributed to any Chrome Extension on my laptop because these links used to work perfectly fine for years until recently and I haven’t installed any new extension for ages.

2. Website

The website loads extremely slowly. At times, it starts shaking wildly, as you can see in the following video exhibit.

3. Page Sorter

Pages are labeled incorrectly in the page sorter view.

e.g. When I click the page labeled AI Startups & Tech…

… it opens the different Companies Pursuit of Profit page.

4. Non-clickable Articles

Many articles are not clickable, so I’m not able to clip them. This makes it difficult to save articles for future reference. I can’t manage with bookmarks of the digital view alone since the online version of the article may become defunct aka linkrot or get moved behind a paywall anytime – neither of which is in my control.

5. Search 

Back in the day, I raved about the search feature on ET Prime.

But nowadays it sucks badly.

Even searches for important keywords throw out null results.

On the rare occasion that it displays a page, clicking on it throws out a weird error message “Error. SyntaxError: Unexpected token ‘<‘, “<!DOCTYPE “… is not valid JSON”.

In the absence of search, the only way to find the online version of a print article is to navigate the website page by page, which is very painful, especially due to the slow loading of the ePaper View.

A related problem is that I read the Pune edition of the print version whereas ET Prime does not have an online version of this city edition. Matching by page numbers is often an exercise in futility since the same article may be printed on different pages in different city editions (see footnote 2).

6. Comment Box

All articles have a comment box and a “Post on Twitter” button.

Sometimes the post comment button is not visible.

Other times, it’s buried under BACK TO TOP button.

When the button is visible and isn’t buried, the comment gets truncated on the Twitter Post screen; besides the URL of the article does not appear, instead it says undefined.

All of these problems are relatively recent. They were not there for the past two years that I’ve been a subscriber of ET Prime. I speculate that they’re the result of some website update that went for a toss.

In his essay entitled “The specific process by which Google enshittified its search“, Cory Doctorow posits that Google Search started sucking due to commercial pressures. Many people complain that they don’t get results for many keywords, even if they search for a full sentence in their own articles. One reason is, by showing junk results, Google makes users search more times, this adds to the time spent on the website and more clicks, ergo more ad revenues.

I’ve another theory. Back in the day, somebody said, “The only way to disrupt Google is not to build a better search engine but to make search irrelevant”. Generative AI is obviously one way to make search irrelevant. Instead of waiting for some other AI company to render its search product irrelevant, I posit that Google decided to engage in a bout of Schumpeterian Creative Destruction and downgrade its search in order to boost its Gemini AI. This reminds me of how Intel reportedly broke a pin on its 80486DX processor and called the resulting processor 80486SX!

I can’t readily think of any attempt at creative destruction by ET Prime but what do I know (see footnote 3).

But all is not bad. ET Prime’s recent partnership with Harvard Business Review is a good thing.

ET Prime subscriptions now include a fresh HBR Exclusive each day, access to the full HBR archive, and “sharp, ad-free reading made for people who want to lead a little better every day.” (see footnote 4)

FOOTNOTES:

  1. During the late 1980s through to late 2000s, Economic Times used to claim that it was the “world’s second largest business daily” (after Wall Street Journal). Given print media’s steady rise in India and fall in USA since then, I won’t be surprised if ET has overtaken WSJ by now. But, since I haven’t heard ET make the claim that it’s the largest business daily in the world, I’ll continue to place it at rank #2.
  2. Often I can’t even match by headine. Different city editions often have different headlines for the same article.
  3. There are rumors of M&A activities at Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd. (BCCL) aka The Times Group, which owns Economic Times (and thereby ET Prime). Not sure how seriously to take the scuttlebut but I noticed that the email address for sending letters to editor of Economic Times changed from the longstanding editet@timesgroup.com to editet@timesofindia.com recently.
  4. I spoke too soon. ET Prime just yanked this section without notice. It has replaced it with a subscription for The Economist but only in its highest plan. Before you ask, no siree, I’m not upgrading, given how enshittified ET Prime has gotten.