This is Twitter’s first investment in India.
It was learned that India’s local social media platform ShareChat announced the completion of the $100 million Series D financing. This round of financing was jointly invested by Twitter and Yuxin Capital. The old shareholders were Shun Capital, Lightspeed Ventures, India Safran Investment funds, India Quotient, Morningside Capital continued to make additional investments, and the Thai joint venture was the exclusive financial advisor for this round. As of now, ShareChat has raised a total of $224 million.
ShareChat is Twitter’s first investment in India. ShareChat founder and CEO Ankush Sachdeva told that there is no clear cooperation plan with Twitter, and more experience sharing.
Pictures | ShareChat
ShareChat, established in 2015, has raised $224 million. To put it simply, ShareChat is similar to Weibo, which serves Indian native language users, and provides content including graphics and video. On ShareChat, users can follow others or explore content through interest categories. These contents cover a wide range of directions, including humor, fashion, health, education, religion and more. According to the company, the current MAU is around 60 million and supports 15 local languages.
The dialect content is one of the most watched tracks in India. Unlike the Chinese market, India is a multilingual country. According to the KPMG report, there are 30 languages in India that use more than 1 million people, and up to 1,600 dialects.
In India’s 1.3 billion people, English users are around 125 million. “And there are about 300 million Internet users in India using local languages,” Ankush told. “And for many native speakers of the Indian language, even if they receive English education, they tend to prefer local language content when they consume content. .”
From the user’s point of view, AnkuSh Introduction, ShareChat’s user portrait is basically the same as that of India’s population. It contains a large number of young people, and the content of religion, cooking and so on attracts some middle-aged and old users. According to Ankush, the content on ShareChat is mainly UGC, and 10%-15% of monthly users are also content creators, most of whom are newcomers to content creation. These users posted content on ShareChat for sharing purposes, not for the purpose of producing explosive content. With less trials, Ankush believes that users of ShareChat have decided that this product has a relatively stronger community attribute.
For ShareChat, matching content and content consumers are very important. On the one hand, constantly seeing content that is “related” to itself can enhance the sense of belonging of content consumers to products. On the other hand, accurate matching can promote communication between users and maintain activeness. From the time a new user enters ShareChat, the company will guess the user’s characteristics based on its network of relationships and determine its content preferences. Then, as the user consumes the content, the content that makes the user feel more “related” is continuously pushed. ShareChat also encourages users to interact with content creators through PM features.
Content, ShareChat has a dedicated content operations team responsible for controlling the quality of the content, while the content review team is responsible for avoiding sensitive content. Through the guidance, some of the head users on ShareChat will gradually evolve into KOL on the platform to produce PGC content.
Ankush said that the company will consider realizing it in a variety of ways, including advertising and social networking. The limited Indian market online advertising budget and eCPM are the problems currently facing companies that rely on advertising to realize. Ankush believes that most of the current advertising budget is spent on TV, paper media, Internet companies such as ShareChat are educating advertisers, the overall volume of online advertising is growing. At the same time, ShareChat can be finely divided by users because of the characteristics of the products, which means that advertisers can achieve more efficient and accurate delivery through ShareChat. At the same time, ShareChat can also increase the value of advertising by extending the time users spend on the platform.
After the process of robbing the head English users, many companies in the Indian market have begun to pay attention to opportunities in the local language market, such as video streaming media, NetFlix, Amazon Prime Video, etc. In the field of news aggregation, there are companies such as Dailyhunt and NewsDog. Today’s headline Helo is also flying on this track.The fast-running player is also a direct competitor to ShareChat.
In the face of competition, Ankush said that ShareChat is now India’s largest local language application. The community attributes of the product and the understanding of the market and users over the past four years are the core barriers of ShareChat.
The team currently has 230 people. Founder and CEO Ankush Sachdeva and co-founder and COO Farid Ahsan, co-founder and CTO Bhanu Bratap graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT).
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