MUMBAI: At a time when local versus global is being heavily promoted, a number of homegrown start-ups are also gaining from the trend. While the user-generated content (UGC) ecosystem in India has largely been dominated by a few global players, a number of homegrown ones are gradually emerging. Roposo, which falls among the promising ones, now has more than five crore users.
In a virtual roundtable by Indiantelevision.com, Roposo co-founder and Glance VP product management Avinash Saxena said that it has more than 100 million daily active users (DAU) now. Roposo was acquired by InMobi Group’s Glance last year, making its ecosystem stronger. Saxena said that a lot of people see content through lock screen on their phones through Glance, which has video content, news and a game centre.
While Saxena mentioned that millions of videos are being created on Roposo, it has various channels on which those videos go up. Rather than having a singular feed like other short video platforms, Roposo believes in the diversity of content, allowing for multi-channel viewing. He also added that content on Roposo is very diverse including creators showcasing talents, users expressing views, updating local news, teaching, etc.
“Roposo is working brilliantly with communities and Glance is helping communities to increase the outreach of videos created through the community. So we thought why not help other apps to create short video platforms and that is why we have a very important SDK. We are testing with a couple of partners and have got wonderful results. It can help any app to become a short video platform for their own community,” Saxena added.
Usually, on Roposo, every user spends 20-25 minutes every day, watching nearly 100 short videos per day. While during the Covid2019 crisis more people have turned online, Saxena said Roposo is serving a purpose to connect people and keeping the connection alive through interesting videos and helping them get over the boredom. According to him, community engagement is keeping their morale high.
However, as now lockdown is easing in many places, Saxena said that many of the videos being created out of the home. He said that many videos are being created on Covid2019-related topics on the back of their interesting filters. They also have a channel dedicated for Covid2019-related topics.
Saxena said that they are directly competing with TikTok although being a different product. He said that the local crowd is supporting them and also sharing constructive feedback. However, he stated that if someone makes a good product, the community will support and extend the app’s awareness, making it viral. But if a product is not good it won’t be able to thrive whatever the origin might be.
“From November we have been a part of InMobi group, which works across the globe. There is a committee which takes care of everything related to security and user information. We have not experienced any attack which has altered content but if there is any we will be quick to respond,” Saxena added on security concerns.
He also opined that allowing creators to be creative, building a community and creating a smart recommendation engine is mandatory for such platforms to succed.
