Mumbai: With short-format videos seeing tremendous growth in the past few years, today it is the go-to place for brand messaging. The videos are in various languages and it is easy for brands to customise their communication for their TG. Today Sharechat is the leading multilingual social media platform, with over 180 million monthly active users and a creator community of +32 million in India.
The platform offers users multiple options to express themselves through audio chat rooms, photo & video posts, microblogging and blogging, and direct messaging, thereby fulfilling all their content needs. Through its unique features and products served in multilingual languages, the platform has been successful in tapping into tier 2, 3 & 4 cities to reach out to language-first users.
ShareChat launched Moj in July 2020 and it is today the largest Indian short video platform, with close to 300 million Indians consuming content each month on the app. Since its launch, it has become the one-stop entertainment platform for language-first and Gen-Z users of India. By empowering millions of creators, Moj is today the home to a thriving creator community in India and provides them with opportunities to learn, upskill, groom, and monetize their talent through live streaming, virtual gifting, and brand collaborations.
Gaurav Jain, Head of Emerging Business at ShareChat and Moj leads the monetization efforts for the platforms. In the organization, he is responsible for Mid-Market businesses, and independent agencies as well as building a self-serve advertising platform to cater to India's small and medium advertisers. A veteran in the industry, Gaurav has over 15 years of experience with monetizing digital platforms in India and the APAC region.
Indiantelevison.com in a Zoom chat with Gaurav Jain, Head of Emerging Business, ShareChat & Moj, the USP that makes them the leader in the sector, brand messaging evolving, no longer an English or Hindi market but a regional market encompassing all languages and much more……
Edited excerpts
On ShareChat being the leader in the market when it comes to short-format content and its performance YoY
We launched Moj in July 2020, and our short-form video proposition has experienced a significant growth trajectory. The creator community has expanded rapidly, and we can clearly say that we are the leading entertainment destination for youth in India. With a monthly active user base of over 300 million, our platform provides creators with the opportunity to showcase their skills, reaching Indian audiences across various categories, including fashion, beauty, dance, food, and education. Currently, we have more than 50 million creators onboard.
Today, the short-form video format has become a melting pot of creativity for users and our platform has witnessed phenomenal growth There are about 16 different languages on Moj and the content that is consumed on our platform is very diverse. Not only in terms of users, but we are seeing that a lot of brands have started utilizing the short-form video proposition as well. Last year alone, we partnered with more than 75 brands and helped them create more than 150 influencer-led bespoke campaigns. These campaigns are customized to communicate the brand message in the best way possible, helping them reach out to their audience in the format and language they're comfortable with. This facilitates holistic creative growth as creators and brands work together.
Today, most companies, from the largest listed companies in the country to start-ups, are using the short-form video format to reach out to the masses.
I would also like to highlight the live video streaming feature on Moj, which allows creators to showcase their talent and engage with users in real time. And it offers a variety of content like talk shows, gaming, comedy, cooking and entertainment. It is now the biggest source of creator monetization on the platform as we have several unique virtual gifting options for fans to reward their favourite creators. Right from user growth through live video streaming to brands utilizing short-form videos, it has been a very exciting journey.
On brand messaging seeing a huge change
A month ago, during a conversation with a financial services client in Mumbai, we were told by the chief marketing officer that they ran a campaign for their mutual fund as a pilot across West India. As each state represents a different culture, the messaging was much more nuanced to cultural context and the language people spoke. The company tried to make its ads creative in different dialects and witnessed an increase in all the advertising metrics, including the click-through rate, conversions, and the general brand uplift.
We are a platform wherein people come to consume content in the language they are comfortable with. Hence, brands capitalizing on this will be getting ahead of the competition.
ShareChat is leading the language-driven social media language revolution in the country. There is no other platform that is doing that, where brands now have the ability, the tools, and the guidance to focus on regional outreach. The regional strength in tier 2,3, & 4 markets coupled with the ad solutions are opening new marketing avenues for marketers.
With increasing internet penetration and the growing metro audience, it has been hard to catch up with that market and thankfully, we have our short-form video platform in India, wherein consumers are coming with that intent, and you have the tools and the sales teams telling you what to do. In that aspect, we offer our advertisers the ability to craft those creatives. Our hashtag challenges are very nuanced, regional, and cultural in nature. We also have nano influencers, who are sitting out of smaller towns across India and are speaking the language of the audience, communicating the brand’s message effectively.
ShareChat is leading this entire messaging change that's happening on the internet today.
On the space being very cluttered when it comes to the short video format and your USP
The space has become less cluttered now as more and more companies are realising that running a short-form video company is not easy. It is not only about delivering the right content; the heart of the short video platforms is their recommender engine. The founders of our company are techies. Since 2015, the company has invested in cutting-edge machine learning and has artificial intelligence teams not only in the country but also outside.
Today, we are very confident and proud that ShareChat has already emerged as a preferred online destination for the Bharat audience. ShareChat has 180 million users and the short-form video has 300 million users. We are leaders in the market because of our AI-led recommendation engine and that is our USP.
Sharechat’s largest and biggest strength will remain the recommendation engine, which helps users serve the right content to the right audience at the right time.
On advertisers and brands depending on digital for their messaging to reach out
No matter what the size of your business is, how big or small your marketing team is, no matter what your production budget is, today, you can access our self-serving ads platform, where one can easily create a compelling ad creative, and reach out to the target audience through personalized multilingual advertising in multiple formats. There is an infinite display banner, to infeed video, to the interstitial. That is one big technology investment that we did as we truly believe that ShareChat, as an ads platform, should not only be restricted to large companies with large budgets and marketing teams.
Apart from that, we have enabled the platform for thousands of micro-influencers to work closely with brands and create a sort of unique brand experience through UGC, which essentially stands for user-generated content. Our regional outlook also required the inclusion of popular local influencers. So that's another thing that we have invested a lot in. And thankfully, they are showing results. Then a lot of it happens in the background. Because at the end of the day, when as a company, you're looking at ShareChat as an advertising platform, you also want to know the return on investment. The most important thing is that the algorithms can showcase the right ad to the right person at the right time. ShareChat has built a very robust ad tech platform to help brands do this at a scale across various formats.
We are working on a bunch of offerings, especially for SMB clients, which will offer them unparalleled reach amongst language-first internet audiences across different parts of the country. We work with 200 large brands, for example, Pepsi, Coke, Airtel, and USHA. And they have reached out to us for their native ad campaigns, through our simplified ad solutions. So, I think in that aspect, we’ve done a lot of technology upgrades not only for our user platform and algorithm but also a lot of investments have gone into making our ad engines more ROI friendly and user-friendly.
On regional market growing leaps and bounds and reaching out to that audience of tier three and tier four audiences
Fair enough, we are currently India's largest AI-powered Indian content platform. Our ability to serve the right content to our users is not only restricted on the user front but also empowers our ad engines. So currently, since we are a multilingual platform, we have made deep inroads in tier three and tier four cities where most of the users are language first.
By using our algorithms, our machine learning and the audience signal the brand intent and past consumption behaviour of the people on the platform. Your algorithms show the right ad created for the right person at the right time and that is what will give them a bang for the buck. Brands can also leverage some of our most active communities by running engagement-driven campaigns that drive 3.5x engagement compared to other social media platforms that we have. It is essentially technology at the heart of it and then like you said, if there is a small advertiser or the company who doesn't have the budgets or the bandwidth to create different languages or machine learning and generative AI on which we are also working on, will ensure that the right creative and the right language reach out to the consumer.
On the new buzzwords, AI, generative AI chat GPT and the role it plays in creators’ economy
I'm a true believer in the positive impact of technology and I genuinely think that artificial intelligence, generative AI, Chat GPT, or machine learning today powers some of the largest tech giants we know. I think these will significantly alter how people perform their jobs and how firms operate.
With the rise of the internet, the media landscape has changed significantly, paving the way for millions of content creators. The rapid development of creative AI tools will propel the creator economy even higher. As technology advances and becomes more and more accessible to creators, it will enable them to operate more efficiently and effectively. It will help creators reach their audience more effectively by ensuring their content gains more traction and improves engagement, among other things.
This is just the beginning of the revolution. As these tools continue to evolve, their versatility and effectiveness will only increase which implies that creators will ultimately, achieve new levels of growth and success. However, it's important to note that AI can’t imitate human creativity. There is always a unique perspective and ideas that a human being brings in. I believe the smartest of the creators will start using these tools and will not be afraid of them.
It's like if decades ago, someone would tell business executives like me, that with the advent of Microsoft Excel, a lot of jobs would be impacted. But things like that led to a lot of efficiency gains. We need to look at it positively. With the creator economy already booming, these tools will only enhance it and it's going to be a game-changer for sure.
On the revenue models you offer and the growth in terms of revenue YoY
ShareChat offers two major revenue models, one is advertising, which enables brands to reach out to their audience in the most effective way giving them the maximum return on their ad spend. The second, as I said, is our live model in which people give virtual gifts (digital tokens) to the creators which can be converted to real money.
On virtual gifting
Virtual gifting is a key monetization option for creators through the Live Audio Chatroom feature on ShareChat. Virtual Gifting empowers users to reward their favourite creator or host through digital tokens as a gesture of appreciation for their talent and creative content. These are mostly microtransactions, with denominations as low as 10/20/100 rupees. Virtual gifting helps thousands of creators stay motivated to continue working towards creating engaging content.
On the vision and mission for the coming year and seeing yourself in the next three years
Well, we are quite enthusiastic about what we are witnessing at a macro level, which is that Indians simply can’t get enough of our short-form video app. With over 400 million active users, we are now the largest homegrown social media company. Our immediate priority is to further make the user experience more personalized and elevate the quality of content by nurturing the creator community. Additionally, we also want to build monetization methods that benefit brands, creators, and our user community. Overall, we are quite optimistic about growth and are highly focused on revenue creation through advertising and microtransactions.
