Umang Bedi, former Facebook India MD, is Dailyhunt president
MUMBAI: Banking on the rapid growth of regional language internet users, Umang Bedi, who resigned as Facebook India and South Asia managing director last October, has joined news and regional language content app Dailyhunt as president.
Dailyhunt, formerly known as Newshunt, is owned by Bengaluru-based mobile consumer products and solutions company, Verse Innovation Pvt. Ltd. The company’s investors include Matrix Partners India, Sequoia, Omidyar Network, Falcon Edge and Bytedance.
“When I resigned from Facebook, I had this itch to do something that would have a large impact at the local level. This is a tremendous opportunity to drive scale via Dailyhunt’s ‘Made in India’ platform,” Bedi said in an interview on Wednesday.
Dailyhunt delivers content using a proprietary algorithm powered by deep learning and machine learning. It has over 155 million app installs offering news articles in 14 languages licensed from over 800 publication partners, according to Bedi.
He added that the Dailyhunt has 80 million monthly active users who spend about 6 billion minutes on the service every month.
The platform, Bedi pointed out, provides original video content in Hindi and Telugu, and free live television streaming service with more than 130 channels across nine languages through a strategic partnership with Vuclip and Yupptv—over-the-top (OTT) video content space providers.
Dailyhunt even picked up a minority stake for ₹15 crore in Oneindia—the local news language portal owned by Rajesh Jain and B G Mahesh—in July 2016. Its latest offering comes in the form of Newzly, a news excerpt mobile application that provides user customised trending headlines, also in nine languages.
Bedi’s work is cut out for him since Dailyhunt’s revenue model relies primarily on online advertisements.
Digital advertising currently accounts for about $1.5-2 billion of the overall advertising pie, which is pegged at about $9.9 billion in 2018, according to a new forecast by Wpp-owned media agency Groupm.