Most brands now prefer YouTube Shorts for regional marketing. “Some of these issues were conveyed to these apps but it didn’t seem like they had much leeway to begin with - had they cleaned/moderated their content, they could have risked losing the user base.” Moreover, these apps had significantly lower video completion rates (VCR) than their competitors like Reels and Shorts even at higher cost per thousand impressions (CPMs), says Pandit. However, “the quality of content soon began to recede and many brands became wary of placing their ads around such content,” he says. In early 2021, when these apps had a high user base, they became part of the media plans of advertisers, he recalls. “Having a user base is one thing, having an engaged user is altogether different,” says Anil Pandit, senior VP, Publicis Media Services. It ceased with the advent of funding winter last year when investors started demanding returns, forcing them to shift focus from downloads to revenue. In contrast, most of these apps, fuelled by institutional funding, had begun on a high note, bragging about clocking millions in user downloads.Ī former employee at one of these apps told ET anonymously that the initial spike in user base in most short video apps was driven by paid-marketing activity. ByteDance -not without its share of controversies around content moderation and surveillance - had slowly built itself into a short-video-sharing giant. After all, even the Chinese app they aim to emulate took close to five years to establish itself in India. One could say it is premature to assess the commercial viability of these TikTok-wannabes when most of them are less than three years into business. Josh and Chingari did not respond to ET’s query till press time. Roposo’s spokesperson says these numbers do not reflect its users from lock screen content app Glance. Active users of Josh, Chingari and Roposo have also gone down year on year, according to Similarweb. These came down to 86.7 million in 2022 and stand at 81.8 million in 2023 so far. In June-December 2021, Moj had an average of 97 million MAUs, as per data from Similarweb accessed by ET. However, third-party figures tell a different story. A spokesperson of the Googlebacked company says that over the last 12 months, it has refocused its growth strategy from “an aggressive paid user acquisition plan” to “organic user acquisition and retention uplift”. Moj says it had 160 million MAUs in 2023. Moj and Josh are two of the few aspirants still trying to build TikTok’s Bharat version. According to numbers shared by Data.ai, Tiki and Zili were among the top six apps by average MAUs in the short video apps category in India since 2021. These apps - which were outside the umbrella of Big Tech like Meta and Google - had shifted focus to India after the TikTok ban. International apps such as Tiki from Singapore and Zili from the house of Xiaomi also shut shop recently.
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