Dot Media, a company in the digital influencer space, is looking to grow with the launch of new products, a studio and a content vertical driven by a YouTube channel targeted at small town GenZ.
The company operates verticals like The Girlfriend Box Troop, Dot Talent and Dot Public Relations started by CEO Shubham Singhal and his friend Vaibhav Pathak in August 2020. In a month of inception, another friend Om Singh joined as Co-founder, helping expand the scope of operations.
From managing creators from the founders’ hometown Kanpur in the Covid lockdown, the intent was to start managing 80 to 100 creators in a year and shift base to Delhi or Mumbai.
By September 2021, Dot Media was managing 100 creators and in October it shifted to Mumbai. The company has also grown in headcount since then, explained Singhal, in conversation with MediaNews4u.com.
He added, “We have started a casting segment though we are initially casting for our talent only. Right now there are multiple tech products on the influencers side in the making, there are fin-tech products we are exploring, we are exploring products for creators who want to become creators. We would have our own tech team, design team. So that’s the space I want to move into and that’s how we would take it forward. There would be a team of at least 300 to 400 people by the end of 2023.”
In a year, the team that was in single digits has grown to around 80 to 85 people, he said.
“We have started with multiple departments. Now we are managing beauty segment creators, content creators, actors and we have a music marketing and a YouTube segment in the making that will develop our own content channel for creators,” revealed the CEO.
Dot Media Verticals
‘The Girlfriend Box (TGB) troop’ was the first vertical that manages beauty creatives and content creators. Realising that it needed a different approach, a talent wing ‘Dot Talent’ for acting and music talent was launched. The unit handles actors like Karan Kundrra andParas Kalnawat and musicians like Gravero and Vasu Kainth. As these people needed a lot of PR, a vertical ’Dot PR’ was launched.
Dot Media, which has two offices in Mumbai, is launching a 2000 sq. ft. studio on 15 January 2023 and another office to accommodate expansion plans.
“Our new vertical will be ‘Dot Studios’. There we will be trying to do a lot of IP work, where we create products with different creators. One of our YouTube channels is under the making, for Gen Z, the millennial crowd, in Tier 2, Tier 3, which is our forte. There are multiple in-house tech and non-tech projects coming up,” underlined the CEO.
It is also planning a department acting as investment managers or advisors to influencers and actors.
All the back-end is handled from Kanpur, handling finance, billing and related queries.
Contribution of verticals to revenue growth
Singhal highlighted, “As of now content creators and actors form a major part of the revenue. There is the music department, another part which brings in a lot of revenue for us, that is music marketing; these are the current two revenue churners in the company. We are planning to have two to three more.
“Beauty, content creative, music verticals give a lot of revenue; we are able to invest this money and sideline it into different verticals which in future will create a lot of revenue. From last December, our revenues have grown more than 15X on the whole,” he revealed.
Speaking on influencers, he said, “We try to take people who would become relevant in the next one or two years and that’s how we try to groom and grow them. We have a specific strategy to grow people over time; we are trying to formulate the strategy on paper like how, what is the formula we use for people to grow and that’s how it has been. We give them certain tips and tricks of growing fast.”
