DES! TANGO

Social networking in India gets a regional flavour.

By Devika Sing Photograph Lanterncamera

T’S PERHAPS AN IDEA whose time has come. An entirely different world is gradually taking shape on social networks. You wake up to suprabhat and end the day with shubhoratri. Instead of ‘ weekend is here’ messages on Friday, Goddess Lakshmi greets you with vanakkam. Mondays aren’t blue as memes adorned with hearts and roses ask you Prem su che. You don’t post stories but ‘ premache status’. Shayari, mehandi designs, chutkulla, romantic Bollywood songs, video clips of Indian daily soaps. Welcome to the universe of home-grown regional language social networks.

Of late, several social media start-ups have emerged in the country that give users the opportunity to network in their preferred language. Take a pick: Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati or even Bhojpuri. Platforms such as Sharechat, ClipApp, Roposo, Mooshak, Yourquote, Inpix from news app Inshorts, et al., are making it possible.

India’s social networking scene has been dominated by global giants Facebook and Twitter so far, but the emergence of Internet 2.0 in India is changing the landscape. Albeit slowly. The next 50 crore users are coming from beyond Tier-I, and they prefer their mother tongue over English. Hence, the desikaran of Internet is in order and, as a result, social networking, too.

According to a report by professional service company KPMG, India had over 23 crore language Internet users at the end of 2016. The number, it estimates, would surge to about 54 crore by 2021, while the English Internet user base would be just about 20 crore. In fact, Indian language users are expected to account for nearly 75 per cent of India’s Internet base by 2021, says the report. Local language- en-

abled keyboards and smartphones have fuelled this trend over the past five years. Some 11 crore language Internet users access social media in India and this number is expected to swell to 30 crore by 2021, projects the KPMG report.

The Boom

Farid Ahsan, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Ankush Sachdeva launched regional language social network ShareChat at a time when “It was uncool to build Indian products in non-English languages”. The trio stumbled on the idea for their start-up when one of them came across a post on Facebook about a WhatsApp Group on Sachin Tendulkar. “There were around 15,000 comments below that post. People were posting their phone numbers and this was something I had never seen before,” recalls Sachdeva.

The founders figured that the audience was looking for local content and reckoned that it might make a bigger impact if it was in a regional language. After multiple experiments and pivots, they finally launched Sharechat in October 2015. Today, the platform, available in 14 Indian languages, has most users from Tier-II and Tier-III cities. The most popular languages on the platform are Tamil, Telugu and Hindi and, interestingly, it’s not available in English. “We observed that more than half the people speak English yet their engagement in the language was super low compared with Indian languages. So, we removed English,” says Sachdeva.

Similarly, Clip App, a social media platform for sharing videos, doesn’t have the provision to share videos in English. Others, such as Mooshak and Shabda Nagari, offer the option to Interact only in Hindi.

According to start-up analytics firm Tracxn, around 329 social networking companies were founded in India in 2015, 231 in 2016 and 45 in 2017. The space has seen an overall funding of $130.68 million so far, it estimates. The number of companies solely operating in the vernacular space is eight, but the figure could be higher as most of the Indian social media companies have either pivoted their models to operate in regional languages or have introduced more languages on their platform.

Social media platforms in India can broadly be divided into three categories. The first is of global giants such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., that have the maximum share of the market. The

“SOME PEOPLE ARE CONTRIBUTING IN HINDI ON OUR PLATFORM, AND THAT IS THE NEXT PHASE OF OUR GROWTH” Michael Lyngdoh ( left) and Anirudh Gupta Co- founders, Tripoto

second includes platforms founded in the early years of this decade, such as Roposo and Tripoto, and have gained a certain foothold. Third is the new generation of networks such as Clip App, ShareChat, Inpix and VidStatus, founded recently and trying to address the content-language market. The new generation is also focussing on mobile and some of them are app- only.

The Adapters

The Indian social networking start-up space doesn’t have many success stories. Most ventures were founded in the past decade and many have already shut shop. The ones that have survived are also aiming to tap local language users now.

Tripoto, a network for travellers launched in 2013, has raised the most funding among Indian social networking platforms, barring social commerce player Limeroad. It already has $32.72 million in its kitty and had a web traffic of 13.36 million in the April-June period, according to the New York-based analytics company SimilarWeb. The platform’s success could be attributed to its focus on building a community around travel discovery. Tripoto, too, is betting on regional audience and content. “Some people are contributing in Hindi on our platform and that is the next phase of our growth,” says Michael Pargal Lyngdoh, Co-founder of Tripoto.

Roposo is another platform that has raised substantial funding. Initially, a social network for fashion enthusiasts, Roposo has pivoted its model now and takes content in eight other languages apart from English. Mayank Bhangadia, CEO and Cofounder of Roposo, says that in December 2017, when they introduced new languages on their platform, 80 per cent of their users had English as their preferred language. However, today 65 per cent of the audience on their platform has selected a language other than English. Just like ShareChat, Roposo, too, saw a rise in engagement on its platform when they introduced more languages. “Regional users spend 35- 40 per cent more time as compared to an English user,” informs Bhangadia.

The popularity of these networks has grown drastically over last one year. ShareChat has already raced ahead of global social networking giants such as Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn in top Android social app rankings in India and the top 15 social apps feature five language-based networks.

Content Is King

A look at Google Play Store labels of regional language social networking apps reveals a similarity. All of them offer “videos, status, quotes, shayari”. The users are not just attracted to networking but content in their language that can be shared with their own closed community on these apps and elsewhere.

The rise of this trend could be traced back to language-based groups on WhatsApp, wherein users would look for content in their own language and share it across mediums. Some of desi social networks feature a “WhatsApp share” button below the posts on their platform, which makes it easier for users to share the content.

The Indian Internet space hit another milestone in June 2018. A December 2017 report by Internet & Mobile Association of India and Kantar IMRB estimated that India would have 50 crore online users by June 2018. While this user base has the maximum share of socio- economic class (SEC) A and B English- speaking audience, it also has a significant share of socio- economic class C. The online business in the country so far has been hovering around the first two classes, but now the effort is on to tap SEC C, and, in addition, another 200 million will be coming online soon. However, the behaviour of this audience on the Internet is different from that of techsavvy, English- speaking SEC A and B.

“SEC C doesn’t do much online shopping,” says Sreedhar Prasad, Partner and Head, Consumer Markets and Internet Business, Advisory, KPMG India. “They may be heavily involved in Facebook and YouTube, but their next level of commerce link or activity online is not very high.” Dev Khare, Managing Partner, Lightspeed India, shares an interesting anecdote. Reminiscing about his behaviour in the early days of Internet in the mid-90s, he says: “We forwarded jokes on our e-mails, chain letters and argued to each other that we would never put our credit card online because somebody would steal our money.” According to experts, including Khare, India right now is witnessing a similar trend. The first-time Internet users in India watch, read, even create content and share it, but don’t transact. The challenge is to have a thriving community and its put focus on generating content in regional languages. It has caught the imagination of investors and start-ups alike and given a ray of hope to social media startups in the country, which have been struggling for a while. For instance, IDG Ventures, an early investor in many e- commerce companies, has made investments in many content community platforms such as POPxo, LittleBlackBook, YourQuote and Tripoto. The venture capital firm is also looking at a lot of players in the vernacular market, focussed on non-English speaking users and users outside of the top 50 cities, informs Karan Mohla, Executive Director and Head of Consumer Media and Technology, IDG Ventures India. YourQuote, a mobile- only platform launched in 2016, offers its users the ability to write a text, turn it into text, picture or video and then share either on other platforms or to the community on the app. The start-up has 98,000 daily active users (DAUs) on its Android app, according to SimilarWeb, and claims to have a high-level of engagement. An average user spent about 19 minutes a day on their platform in June, estimates SimilarWeb. Other platforms such as Tripoto, Roposo, ShareChat and Clip App, too, focus on content creation by the audience. The motive is to keep users engaged and push for monetisation once the regional language ecosystem is ready.

“REGIONAL USERS SPEND 35 TO 40 PER CENT MORE TIME COMPARED

TO AN ENGLISH USER” ( L- R) Mayank Bhangadia, Avinash Saxena and Kaushal Shubhank

Co- founders, Roposo