According to a report by BBC, India being a country of 1.3 billion people has a very small number of English speakers that is – over 125 million.
This clearly depicts that a majority of our population consists of regional language speakers. With increasing internet penetration and India being the most internet consumption heavy country with over 530 million users, it is giving content platforms to bag this opportunity and follow the ‘vernacular’ fashion as the most trending topic in the industry.
From writing to video/audio content, here are the fastest growing regional content startups of 2019.
Tiktok
TikTok is a social media video app for creating and sharing short lip-sync, comedy, and talent videos. It is arguably India’s fastest-growing and most-downloaded app today, with 200 million users in Tier I, II, and III and even the deepest pockets of India to share their passion and creative expression. Available in 10 Indian languages, Tiktok added 88.6 million users in the country early this year. By connecting and empowering digital Indians through content, Tiktok looks forward to making a positive contribution to the country’s thriving creative economy.
Momspresso.com
Momspresso.com is the largest user-generated content sharing platform that offers support to women across the country, not just in their journeys as parents but also in their lives. Launched in 2010, based out of Gurgaon, Haryana, it is a platform that attracts 12000 bloggers and 4000 video creators, and sees 83Mn monthly page views for its blogs whereas 163Mn monthly video views in 10 different languages including English, Hindi, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, Punjabi, and Kannada. Momspresso eyes 35 crores of revenue for the year 2019-2020; and closed the year 2018-2019 at 16 crores. Over 100 brands (Dettol, Dove, Nestle, etc.) have engaged with Momspresso.com in the last 12 months to connect with women and are actively spending on regional content to tap vernacular users. Earlier this year, it also launched India’s first digital vernacular agency, Mompresso Bharat.
Hubhopper
Launched in the year 2015, Hubhopper is India’s largest podcast and audio-on-demand platform at present. With over 1 million hours of content spread across 12 vernacular languages, Hubhopper is present across 15 million touchpoints. It has managed to change the way people consume audio content in India. Hubhopper has launched ‘Hubhopper Studio’ an online studio that enables the potential content creators to launch their very own podcast in 3 simple steps: Record, Launch, and Distribute. It provides independent and small-town podcasters with all the assistance and their podcasts get featured on Hubhopper under ‘Hubhopper Original Program’, which has been a hit amongst both urban and rural listeners and aims to on-board 5000 podcasters in the next 1 year. Hubhopper envisions to grow parallel with the audio streaming industry and keep making the process of content consumption and creation simpler and more beneficial while emerging as one of the best content-disseminating platforms.
Vokal
Vokal, a knowledge-sharing platform for Hindi users, recently added 10 regional languages (Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi, Oriya, and Assamese) on its platform allowing sharing of information and get answers to queries. Trying to bridge the information and knowledge gap among the non-English internet users by enabling peer-to-peer knowledge sharing, the platform sees huge scope for such a service in regional languages. Vokal has more than 2 million monthly active users and it is aiming to take the same to 15-20 million by the end of 2019.
Sharechat
Similar to Facebook and Twitter, ShareChat enables users to post and share videos, songs, images, and other content, as well as discover content that is topical and trending. Launched in January 2015, it offers the content consumption and sharing platform only in Indian vernacular languages. ShareChat now boasts of 60 million monthly active users and aims to double its MAU by December 2020, it is home to 15 Indic languages. It aims to strengthen its presence in Tier-II cities.
