Inshorts is India’s highest-rated and #1 English news app, with more than 10 million users on its platform. The app curates the most significant news items of the day, across categories like national, world, politics, business, sports, technology, and entertainment, in just 60 words with a link to read the stories that interest them, in detail. Inshorts also continues to be India’s highest-rated news app on Android since January 2014 with a rating of 4.6 and has more than 3 billion page views per month.
Public App is India’s largest location-based social network with 60 million+ active users and one million videos being created every month. Within a short span of 6 months from its launch, Public became the No. 1 ranked app on the play store in the category and continues to be so. The app is available in all major Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati, and Marathi. Public App is a social network for everything local – from local updates and happenings to local commerce, jobs, classifieds, and more.
Tarun Arora, COO, Inshorts, and Public in an exclusive chat with Medianews4U talks on the growth of the platform, connecting Bharat to India, and much more…
How has Public App’s growth been and how much traction was seen during the past one and a half years?
Public is a home-grown location-based social network that was launched in April 2019 to help people connect and be informed about their community and local authorities through real-time updates. It is currently India’s largest location-based social network and the No.1 app for vernacular video updates with over 60 million active users. According to the Sensor Tower Report in March 2021, Public ranked 4th in the list of top social media networks in India. Content available on the application is in all major Indian languages including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati, and Marathi.
Within six months of launch, the app became one of the fastest-growing Indian social media apps. During the pandemic, our user-base doubled from 15 million to 30 million in just 1 month, and the average time spent by users jumped by 50%. At present, a user on the App spends an average of 28 minutes per day and over 1mn+ videos are being created monthly on the platform.
In the past year we are seeing the rise of regional OTT content or advertising, your thoughts?
India is known for its sheer diversity, where people belong to different cultures and are comfortable interacting in their local languages. Regional content delivers the real essence of the messaging and creates a deeper impact. Internet penetration, affordable data, and the pandemic pushing people to use digital avenues have further seen a spike of internet users from rural India.
As per Google India’s report, 88% of Indian language internet users are more likely to respond to a digital advertisement in their local language. Thus, the scope of vernacular advertising is huge and it is just going to increase. Keeping these statistics in mind, it can’t be denied that even this year would witness more of such localized ads. Brands need to be agile and create marketing strategies keeping the regional markets of India in mind.
Even at Public, brands have started running vernacular campaigns that have helped them to achieve a great response. Last year we concluded a geo-targeted ad campaign with Vendantu, which involved seven major Indian languages – Marathi, Malayalam, Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, English, and Hindi. The day-long campaign received a great response and generated over 40 lakh views, with an industry-best engagement rate of 4.8% and CTR (Click through rate) of 1.32%.
How is Public App connecting Bharat to India?
With more than 19,500 languages or dialects in India, vernacular content plays an integral role in purposeful interactions and conveying the message. Public App was created to provide citizens of Bharat a platform to connect and be informed about their community and local authorities through real-time updates in local languages. It is an easy-to-access video-only social media platform for local updates in vernacular languages that can be accessed by a farmer in Jabalpur to an investment banker in Mumbai. In a nutshell, Public thrives to fulfill the desire of an individual who wants to stay updated about his surroundings. It is an app for anyone and everyone, irrespective of the language they speak or the place they belong to.
Public also empowers people by giving them access to such a platform where they can share stories that are usually ignored by national publications. The app connects people to their local authorities and politicians to raise any issues/concerns which directly affect them. With local authorities/politicians forming a huge part of the application, issues are personally taken up and addressed. The app uplifts even the smallest community and brings the entire country on just one platform which gives them a sense of oneness. The app is built in India for making the life of Indians who are even living in the remotest of villages easier. Through the app, we are striving towards reformed and developed societies that will take our nation to greater heights.
You have said you are providing digital avenues to small and medium businesses. Can you please elaborate?
Small businesses are an integral part of our society and our app is providing them a digital platform to target local customers. With the help of hyper localization and geo-targeting, Public enables small businesses to reach their desired target audience on a district, city, and state level. For a stronger impact, the ads are delivered either in video or display format. Public allows small businesses to advertise digitally and cater to an expansive digital world. Currently, these small businesses come from varied sectors such as healthcare, daily utilities, education, and others. For example, local coaching centers (below or above K12) use the platform to promote online classes with the surge of digital learning throughout the pandemic.
Recently, politicians are utilizing the opportunity of reaching out to the community by advertising festive season greetings on Public App. This is because Public app not only helps them in sharply targeting users that live within the radius but also handholds them at every step so that those who do not have knowledge of digital platforms can easily communicate their message to the desired target audience in their local language through innovative and engaging video ads.
We have received a phenomenal response from the advertisers who have benefited from it. At present, we have actively associated with 10,000+ local advertisers in India.
