ShareChat will continue to focus on growing and retaining users over monetising the platform, a top executive of the homegrown social media platform told ET, even as the app faces intense competition from Chinese ByteDance-owned short video platforms TikTok and Helo in India.
In the last six months, ShareChat has consciously boosted levers to drive user-engagement on the platform, which includes building several interest-based micro-communities on subjects such as commerce and religion, gaming and fantasy sports, said cofounder and CEO Ankush Sachdeva in an exclusive interview.
Making money is the next step, he added. “Even today, you don’t have nuanced content available and that has been the broad theme at ShareChat. How do we bring more region-specific content in the ecosystem?”
Twitter-backed Sharechat has more than 5.8 million daily active users on Android, which has been broadly flat over the last six months, according to data sourced from tracker AppAnnie. TikTok has 44.57 million, while Helo has 16 million daily active users. Sharechat says it has over 60 million monthly active users. The company declined to share daily active users data.
Sachdeva said the platform has been evaluating different regions and differences in user trends based on geographies. Going forward, ShareChat plans to build on different ethnic cultures from across the country to provide users unique content.
“It becomes very difficult for the Indian netizens to search information in vernacular content. Platforms like Quora or Reddit solved it for the English-speaking users, but nothing is still available in an organized curated format in Indian languages,” he said.
As part of its community building initiative, the Bengaluru-based startup has weeded out content that would be considered unsuitable to watch with family. “We will be looking at strengthening our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to further personalize the platform,” Sachdeva said.
The move comes at a time when apps like TikTok and BigoLive have drawn flak for inappropriate content on their platforms. ShareChat, however, moderates content to global standards followed by Twitter. The microblogging platform led a $100 million investment round in ShareChat last year.
Monetisation Push
ShareChat has started advertising on its platform in the last two quarters and has seen a slew of top brands including Coca Cola, Oyo, MTR, Airtel, Pepsi and the Future Group use it to target audiences in small towns and villages.
However, TikTok has remained the preferred choice for brands as the short-video app has been a rage among millennials in small towns and cities, according to brands and marketing experts.
ShareChat recently appointed regional leaders to lead its monetization push.
Satyajit Deb Roy, director – North and East was hired from JioSaavn, while Satyen Kishan, director – West came on board from MX Player. Debasmita Ghosh, Director – South, was earlier heading sales for Twitter in south India. The company has already built a 50-member team to drive brand solutions.
“Advertising will be our monetization strategy, other things like social commerce and gaming are experiments,” Sachdeva said.
The company has also developed an app, Jeet11, which allows betting on cricket and football matches.
The app so far has more than 120,000 registered users.
In August, the company raised $100 million, led by Twitter along with participation from existing investors Shunwei Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, SAIF Capital, India Quotient and Morningside Venture Capital.
ET last year reported that Mohalla Tech, the owner of ShareChat, made Rs 25.8 crore in revenue for the fiscal year ended March 2019.
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