Delhi based inshorts has a unique user base of 10 million+
Sports, business and technology are most popular categories amongst millennials in the country
New Delhi: Driven by rapid digitisation, there has been a tremendous rise in online content consumption amongst millenials in our country. An analysis done by content discovery and distribution app Inshorts, to understand the content consumption trends of this fast paced digital populace have shown that sports, business and technology are the most emerging and read about categories in this context. With over 10 million unique users, inshorts has a high engagement rate and is most read by millenials.
Trumping Bollywood and Politics category, the analysis gives an interesting insight into readership patterns. While Cricket has always been the first love of the country and 80% of sports news focussed on the game, it was insightful to find the millennial reader more interested in Business and Technology over entertainment. The app introduced a special IPL category this IPL season, given the high interest of readers during this season.
Focused on curating relevant personalised content for the youth, Inshorts has users in almost all the cities of India with majority of the user base coming from tier I and tier II cities. The app has the highest open rate of 81.54% in news and magazines category with 49.23% active days. Each user opens the app avg 3 times everyday and spends a minimum of 13 minutes on it .
Speaking about this, Azhar Iqubal, CEO and Co-founder, Inshorts, said “Empowered by on-the-go accessibility, millennials today are consuming a diverse spectrum of content everyday. Observing their reading patterns has led us to believe that these consumers primarily gravitate towards short form content formats which are digitally-led and completely curated for their interests”.
“There is a significant shift in the preference of users and sports, technology and business news has become the centrepiece of consumption over the years. It is interesting to see how an entertainment loving nation is gradually moving towards other sectors of consumption.” he added.
Inshorts became operationally profitable in November 2017. Hitting a net revenue run rate of Rs 25 crore in 2017, as compared to Rs 3 crore in 2016, the company is targeting a net revenue rate of Rs 100 crore in FY2018, with revenue coming in through branded partnerships and sponsored content.
Inshorts was set up by a team of IITians, Azhar Iqubal & Anunay Arunav of IIT Delhi and Deepit Purkayastha of IIT Kharagpur in 2013. Their entrepreneurial journey began from TLabs incubator in 2013 which was followed by a seed round from Times Internet and a group of angel investors including the founders of Flipkart. In 2015, Inshorts raised a Series A round from Tiger Global and Rebright Partners, landing its Series B within 4 months, from Tiger Global.
Inshorts also continues to be India’s highest-rated news app on Android since January 2014 with a rating of 4.6, 10 million+ downloads and 2 billion page views per month.
