After the ban on TikTok in 2020, many startups here in India built short-form video platforms. TikTok attracted over 240 million active users in the country. It had 20 million active content creators who uploaded at least one video a month.
Indian versions built up their own user base of content creators. TakaTak attracted 9-12 million users. Moj commanded an audience of 10-15 million.
ShareChat launched Moj. MX player launched TakaTak. Glance has been funded by inMobi and Google. Glance acquired Roposo. Dailyhunt has launched Josh. There are big players such as Google Shorts and Facebook’s Reel.
In smaller towns, the user base of short-form video is bigger than that of YouTube. Roposo has 30 million active users.
Glance allows live commerce through which creators run their shopfronts. Roposo has 500 creators who live-stream commerce. Glance has acquired Shop 101, a tech company that helps it to do influencer-led and celebrity commerce. All short-form videos carry ads for monetisation. However, these attract only 1 percent of the total advertising revenues. As people spend more time to see these videos, these will bring in more advertising revenue.