BENGALURU:
ShareChat will continue to focus on growing and retaining users over monetising the platform, a top executive of the homegrown social media app told ET, even as it faces intense competition from Chinese ByteDance-owned short video platforms Tik-Tok and Helo in India.
In the last six months, ShareChat has consciously boosted levers to drive user-engagement on the platform, which includes building several interest-based micro-communities on subjects such as commerce and religion, gaming and fantasy sports, said CEO
Ankush Sachdeva in an exclusive interview.
Making money is the next step, he added. “Even today, you don’t have nuanced content available and that has been the broad theme at ShareChat. How do we bring more region-specific content in the ecosystem?”
Twitter-backed ShareChat’s daily active user number has been broadly flat over the last six months, according to data sourced from tracker
AppAnnie.
Sachdeva said the platform has been evaluating different regions and differences in user trends based on geographies. Going forward, ShareChat plans to build on different ethnic cultures from across the country to provide users unique content. “It becomes very difficult for the Indian
netizens to search information in vernacular content. Platforms like Quora or Reddit solved it for the English-speaking users, but nothing is still available in an organised curated format in Indian languages,” he said.
As part of its community building initiative, the startup has weeded out content that would be considered unsuitable to watch with family. “We will be looking at strengthening our artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to further personalise the platform,” Sachdeva said. The move comes at a time when apps including ShareChat,
TikTok and BigoLive have drawn flak for inappropriate content on their platforms. ShareChat has removed and moderated content to global moderation standards followed by Twitter.
MONETISATION PUSH
ShareChat has started advertising on its platform in the last two quarters and has seen a slew of top brands including Coca Cola, Oyo, MTR, Airtel, Pepsi and the Future Group use it to target audiences in small towns and villages. However, TikTok has remained the preferred choice for brands as the short-video app has been a rage among millennials in small towns and cities, according to brands and marketing experts.
ShareChat recently appointed regional leaders to lead its monetisation push. Satyajit Deb Roy, director – North and East was hired from JioSaavn, while Satyen Kishan, director – West came on board from MX Player. Debasmita Ghosh, Director – South, was earlier heading sales for Twitter in south India.
The company has already built a 50-member team to drive brand solutions. “Advertising will be our monetisation strategy, other things like social commerce and gaming are experiments,” Sachdeva said. ET last year reported that Mohalla Tech, the owner of Share-Chat, made Rs 25.8 crore in revenue for the fiscal year ended March 2019.