In the following months, a dozen, homegrown, venture capital-funded apps emerged to fill the void left by ByteDance’s flagship platform in India, then its biggest overseas market with 200 million active users.
They even took a leaf out of ByteDance’s playbook and paid celebrities and creators to sign up and post content on their apps. Geet — who goes by her first name and is @theofficialgeet on Instagram — entered into an exclusive contract with one of these apps a year into the hype cycle. While she does not disclose the name of the app to ET, she recalls that she felt something was off.
“I would get a lot of views on every video I posted but it did not lead to engagement in the form of comments or messages like it normally does with my content,” she says. “The figure seemed inflated to me.” After her six-month contract expired, she did not post on the app. Her experience resonates with many in the industry.
Three years after they vociferously claimed to build a TikTok for Bharat, most of these short video apps have pivoted, merged, or simply disappeared. Their average monthly active users (MAUs) have declined year-on-year, and so have their app installs, according to data sourced by ET. Advertisers are reluctant to include them in their digital media plans — there has been a 70% fall since 2021, as per media agency executives.
Among the major players from India, MX TakaTak was acquired by ShareChat for its own TikTok-like app called Moj in February 2022 (Disclosure: MX TakaTak was owned by Times Internet, a subsidiary of Bennett, Coleman and Company Ltd, which publishes The Economic Times). Mitron TV’s site does not exist anymore and its social profiles were last updated in 2021. Trell reportedly laid off about 90% of its workforce last year after facing a probe over financial irregularities. Chingari was in the news recently for
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having allegedly moved towards live-streaming adult content, its main avenue for monetisation along with live audio rooms, according to an Inc42 report. International apps such as Tiki from Singapore and Zili from the house of Xiaomi also shut shop recently.
These apps — which were outside the umbrella of Big Tech like Meta and Google — had shifted focus to India after the TikTok ban. 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.
Moj and Josh are two of the few aspirants still trying to build TikTok’s Bharat version. Moj says it had 160 million MAUs in 2023. 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”.
However, third-party figures tell a different story. In June-December 2021, Moj had an average of 97 million MAUs, as per data from Similarweb accessed by ET.
These came down to 86.7 million in 2022 and stand at 81.8 million in 2023 so far. That is half the number claimed by Moj. Active users of Josh, Chingari and Roposo have also gone down year on year, according to Similarweb. Roposo’s spokesperson says these numbers do not reflect its users from lock screen content app Glance. Josh and Chingari did not respond to ET’s query till press time.
SHORT & LONG OF IT
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. After all, even the Chinese app they aim to emulate took close to five years to establish itself in India. ByteDance —not without its share of controversies around content moderation and surveillance — had slowly built itself into a short-video-sharing giant. In contrast, most of these apps, fuelled by institutional funding, had begun on a high note, bragging about clocking millions in user downloads.
A 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. It ceased with the advent of funding winter last year when investors started demanding returns, forcing them to shift focus from downloads to revenue.
“Having a user base is one thing, having an engaged user is altogether different,” says Anil Pandit, senior VP, Publicis Media Services. In early 2021, when these apps had a high user base, they became part of the media plans of advertisers, he recalls.
However, “the quality of content soon began to recede and many brands became wary of placing their ads around such content,” he says. “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. Most brands now prefer YouTube Shorts for regional marketing.
While TikTok was an indispensable tool for music promotion, especially regional music, labels do not always find a similar “hit rate” in the alternative apps. “I haven’t heard of that many songs being broken on one of these apps,” says Mandar Thakur, COO, Times Music, which is a division of Bennett Coleman & Co Ltd that publishes ET. Short video apps are a source of revenue for music labels as the former have to pay licensing fee to use their catalogue of songs to supplement the audio of their user-generated videos.
“The licensing money has reduced by about 45% from what it was in 2021,” says Thakur. “Most of them have not taken licenses from every label as usage varies frequently and business models keep changing,” he adds.
THREE YEARS, NO THREE CHEERS
Not counting TikTok, there are about 438 active shortvideo-sharing social platforms globally, as per Tracxn. Over 50 have got institutional funding, cumulatively raising $6.95 billion. Half a dozen of them were e-born in India around this time three years ago.
Their opportunity was clear: TikTok had democratised the creator economy and brought non-urban and non-elite Indians into the limelight in a way that drew audience from tier2 and -3 India to it. This forced advertisers to direct their ad spends to it for better regional penetration. When the app got banned, the alternatives hoped to grab this share of audience and advertiser interest.
Where did they go wrong?
It comes down to two things, says Madhukar Sinha: “Algorithmic capabilities and existing user base of tech giants Meta and Google.” He adds: “You need good quality retention for user growth to happen, and good quality retention is a function of money and time to hire talent. And you need to do a lot of marketing to get data from users. If you thought that when TikTok went away you would retain and convert users after 20-30 million downloads, that was a fool’s dream.” Sinha is a founding partner at India Quotient. His portfolio includes companies like Sharechat and Koo.
TikTok’s algorithm is considered to be the envy of the industry. A widely held belief is that even Instagram lags behind TikTok on many fronts because of an inferior algorithm.
Having creators on payroll made the process of creating and uploading videos transactional in the apps that mushroomed after the TikTok ban, says a senior team member at one of these apps. ByteDance, too, had paid online celebrities to create content, “but they wanted to stay on TikTok instead of waiting for their contracts to expire,” says Anshu Patni, creator coach and former talent agent from Mumbai, who administered a few creator deals with some of the alternative apps. TikTok had provided them with tools to make content in a creative manner, she says.
“Most of these newer platforms did not even try to solve for creativity. They looked at creators as numbers and not as sources of creative ideas,” she adds. Further, creators who exclusively signed with these apps could post on international rivals though not on homegrown ones, says Geet.
“Had it been exclusive, people would have gravitated towards the new app for a creator they liked. Now they had the option to catch that content on Instagram anyway,” she adds. The nobodyto-somebody pipeline was strong with TikTok. “These apps had the opportunity to push smaller creators instead of paying the big ones,” she says.
Despite this, some former employees say these apps may still have a shot if they focus on improving recommendation engines and building new creators. A few of the apps have announced creator tools and offline events to engage with brands and content creators.
But not everyone is sure they can succeed in a complex market like India. “TikTok’s algorithm had exposed tier-2 and -3 India to the world’s best content, which appealed to many who found western culture and lifestyle aspirational,” says Aruna Chawla, a consumer behaviour researcher.
“It also made us an equal part of a global community that looked forward to our content.”
With the homegrown alternatives, that access and opportunity was gone so it was natural for many to gravitate to the next best option in Reels and then Shorts.
“These players kept harping on the idea of making a Bharat app,” says Chawla. “What they didn’t realise was that maybe we didn’t need a Bharat app. We needed to figure out what Bharat needs in that app.”
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