In the next months, a dozen, homegrown, enterprise capital-funded apps emerged to fill the void left by ByteDance’s flagship platform in India, then its largest abroad market with 200 million lively customers.
They even took a leaf out of ByteDance’s playbook and paid celebrities and creators to enroll and put up content material on their apps. Geet — who goes by her first identify and is @theofficialgeet on Instagram — entered into an unique contract with considered one of these apps a 12 months into the hype cycle. While she doesn’t disclose the identify of the app to ET, she remembers that she felt one thing was off.
“I would get a lot of views on every video I posted but it did not lead to engagement in the form of comments or messages like it normally does with my content,” she says. “The figure seemed inflated to me.” After her six-month contract expired, she didn’t put up on the app. Her expertise resonates with many within the trade.
Three years after they vociferously claimed to construct a TikTok for Bharat, most of those brief video apps have pivoted, merged, or just disappeared. Their common month-to-month lively customers (MAUs) have declined year-on-year, and so have their app installs, in keeping with information sourced by ET. Advertisers are reluctant to incorporate them of their digital media plans — there was a 70% fall since 2021, as per media company executives.
Among the most important gamers from India, MX TakaTak was acquired by ShareChat for its personal TikTok-like app referred to as Moj in February 2022 (Disclosure: MX TakaTak was owned by Times Internet, a subsidiary of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd, which publishes The Economic Times). Mitron TV’s web site doesn’t exist anymore and its social profiles have been final up to date in 2021. Trell reportedly laid off about 90% of its workforce final 12 months after going through a probe over monetary irregularities. Chingari was within the news just lately for
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having allegedly moved in direction of live-streaming grownup content material, its essential avenue for monetisation together with reside audio rooms, in keeping with an Inc42 report. International apps comparable to Tiki from Singapore and Zili from the home of Xiaomi additionally shut store just lately.
These apps — which have been outdoors the umbrella of Big Tech like Meta and Google — had shifted focus to India after the TikTok ban. According to numbers shared by Data.ai, Tiki and Zili have been among the many prime six apps by common MAUs within the brief video apps class in India since 2021.
Moj and Josh are two of the few aspirants nonetheless making an attempt to construct TikTok’s Bharat model. Moj says it had 160 million MAUs in 2023. A spokesperson of the Googlebacked firm says that over the past 12 months, it has refocused its progress technique from “an aggressive paid user acquisition plan” to “organic user acquisition and retention uplift”.
However, third-party figures inform a distinct story. In June-December 2021, Moj had a median of 97 million MAUs, as per information from Similarweb accessed by ET.
These got here all the way down to 86.7 million in 2022 and stand at 81.8 million in 2023 to date. That is half the quantity claimed by Moj. Active customers of Josh, Chingari and Roposo have additionally gone down 12 months on 12 months, in keeping with Similarweb. Roposo’s spokesperson says these numbers don’t replicate its customers from lock display screen content material app Glance. Josh and Chingari didn’t reply to ET’s question until press time.
SHORT & LONG OF IT
One might say it’s untimely to evaluate the business viability of those TikTok-wannabes when most of them are lower than three years into business. After all, even the Chinese app they intention to emulate took shut to 5 years to ascertain itself in India. ByteDance —not with out its share of controversies round content material moderation and surveillance — had slowly constructed itself right into a short-video-sharing large. In distinction, most of those apps, fuelled by institutional funding, had begun on a excessive word, bragging about clocking tens of millions in person downloads.
A former worker at considered one of these apps instructed ET anonymously that the preliminary spike in person base in most brief video apps was pushed by paid-marketing exercise. It ceased with the arrival of funding winter final 12 months when buyers began demanding returns, forcing them to shift focus from downloads to income.
“Having a user base is one thing, having an engaged user is altogether different,” says Anil Pandit, senior VP, Publicis Media Services. In early 2021, when these apps had a excessive person base, they grew to become a part of the media plans of advertisers, he remembers.
However, “the quality of content soon began to recede and many brands became wary of placing their ads around such content,” he says. “Some of these issues were conveyed to these apps but it didn’t seem like they had much leeway to begin with — had they cleaned/moderated their content, they could have risked losing the user base.” Moreover, these apps had considerably decrease video completion charges (VCR) than their opponents like Reels and Shorts even at greater price per thousand impressions (CPMs), says Pandit. Most manufacturers now desire YouTube Shorts for regional advertising and marketing.
While TikTok was an indispensable instrument for music promotion, particularly regional music, labels don’t all the time discover a related “hit rate” within the various apps. “I haven’t heard of that many songs being broken on one of these apps,” says Mandar Thakur, COO, Times Music, which is a division of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd that publishes ET. Short video apps are a income for music labels as the previous need to pay licensing charge to make use of their catalogue of songs to complement the audio of their user-generated movies.
“The licensing money has reduced by about 45% from what it was in 2021,” says Thakur. “Most of them have not taken licenses from every label as usage varies frequently and business models keep changing,” he provides.
THREE YEARS, NO THREE CHEERS
Not counting TikTok, there are about 438 lively shortvideo-sharing social platforms globally, as per Tracxn. Over 50 have gotten institutional funding, cumulatively elevating $6.95 billion. Half a dozen of them have been e-born in India round this time three years in the past.
Their alternative was clear: TikTok had democratised the creator economic system and introduced non-urban and non-elite Indians into the limelight in a manner that drew viewers from tier2 and -3 India to it. This pressured advertisers to direct their advert spends to it for higher regional penetration. When the app obtained banned, the options hoped to seize this share of viewers and advertiser curiosity.
Where did they go improper?
It comes down to 2 issues, says Madhukar Sinha: “Algorithmic capabilities and existing user base of tech giants Meta and Google.” He provides: “You need good quality retention for user growth to happen, and good quality retention is a function of money and time to hire talent. And you need to do a lot of marketing to get data from users. If you thought that when TikTok went away you would retain and convert users after 20-30 million downloads, that was a fool’s dream.” Sinha is a founding associate at India Quotient. His portfolio contains firms like Sharechat and Koo.
TikTok’s algorithm is taken into account to be the envy of the trade. A extensively held perception is that even Instagram lags behind TikTok on many fronts due to an inferior algorithm.
Having creators on payroll made the method of making and importing movies transactional within the apps that mushroomed after the TikTok ban, says a senior group member at considered one of these apps. ByteDance, too, had paid on-line celebrities to create content material, “but they wanted to stay on TikTok instead of waiting for their contracts to expire,” says Anshu Patni, creator coach and former expertise agent from Mumbai, who administered a couple of creator offers with a number of the various apps. TikTok had supplied them with instruments to make content material in a artistic method, she says.
“Most of these newer platforms did not even try to solve for creativity. They looked at creators as numbers and not as sources of creative ideas,” she provides. Further, creators who completely signed with these apps might put up on worldwide rivals although not on homegrown ones, says Geet.
“Had it been exclusive, people would have gravitated towards the new app for a creator they liked. Now they had the option to catch that content on Instagram anyway,” she provides. The nobodyto-somebody pipeline was robust with TikTok. “These apps had the opportunity to push smaller creators instead of paying the big ones,” she says.
Despite this, some former workers say these apps should still have a shot in the event that they concentrate on bettering advice engines and constructing new creators. A couple of of the apps have introduced creator instruments and offline occasions to have interaction with manufacturers and content material creators.
But not everybody is certain they will reach a fancy market like India. “TikTok’s algorithm had exposed tier-2 and -3 India to the world’s best content, which appealed to many who found western culture and lifestyle aspirational,” says Aruna Chawla, a client behaviour researcher.
“It also made us an equal part of a global community that looked forward to our content.”
With the homegrown options, that entry and alternative was gone so it was pure for a lot of to gravitate to the following best choice in Reels after which Shorts.
“These players kept harping on the idea of making a Bharat app,” says Chawla. “What they didn’t realise was that maybe we didn’t need a Bharat app. We needed to figure out what Bharat needs in that app.”
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com