How SHAREit became India's leading digital content platform

Several international giants have struggled to capitalise on India's small-town user base, which is more than the population of Europe. It took Facebook almost 10 years to do that and WhatsApp more than six years to crack it. And it still hasn't been done fully.

However, it took SHAREit less than three years to make inroads into the tier II and III market and become one of the top content-sharing platforms in India.

The company's India CEO Karam Malhotra says the success of the platform rests on the vernacular content options it provides to a diverse country.

About one-third of the users utilise it in Hindi and the South languages constitute at least a good 50% of SHAREit. Hindi and Marathi constitute about 35%-40%. And pure English-seeking content viewers who want to watch content in English are about 10%-15%.

Karam Malhotra

"In India, language is super hard to identify. Almost 85% of the population in India doesn’t speak English. When WhatsApp, Google and Facebook started in India, they were mostly in English, they had very little vernacular content," Malhotra told BuzzInContent.com.

“People still feel that if you don’t speak English, you get an inferior product experience and that’s why most people’s Androids are default in English. But that’s not true.” In India, 85% of SHAREit’s 200 million monthly active users are not fluent English-speakers.

How SHAREit became India's third most downloaded app

In 2017-18 SHAREit was at number five in India, Truecaller and Facebook Messenger were ahead of it. In 2018-19, it is ahead of both. SHAREit has grown to the third position in India, after WhatsApp and Facebook, as the platform with largest monthly active users.

Malhotra said SHAREit reaches the mass market of the country. So, the platform’s scale is not coming technically always from the big cities. SHAREit is a platform that grew bottom up in India, it grew from tier IV, tier III, tier II towns. It is over-indexed in small town India, where its penetration on smartphones is about 85%-90%.

SHAREit’s number one market in India is UP, considered a very difficult market to penetrate. The platform recently did a week-long campaign for a brand in UP and hit about a crore of users in a week. It not only pre-caches on ads but also on video content.

It doesn’t use 4G data to push content on to the user’s phone, but when people share content in their network, by default they also share a lot of offline content for consumption. “40-50 million people are sharing content daily on SHAREit and are themselves spreading content,” pointed out Malhotra.

The monetisation strategy

The platform has tied up with various OTT platforms for distribution of their content on a revenue-sharing model. SHAREit is also working with various other categories to ensure a steady revenue stream. Talking about monetisation, Malhotra said that monetising vernacular was still a challenge in India.

Speaking about the brands that engage with them for various projects, Malhotra said they have worked with a few gaming clients and influencer marketing and content marketing is really important for them. Sometimes clients/brands mention that they want campaigns in more than one language, so sometimes the platform ends up running eight simultaneous campaigns on it, even if it’s an all-India roadblock. The clicks that they get through multi-content campaigns is 3%-4% compared to less than 1% if they put everything in English or Hindi in India.

SHAREit has also worked on a few ministries and government campaigns. It tries to get content into semi-urban areas or semi-rural areas. They placed a lot of content and pre-cached it. 60%-70% of watch-time comes from content that is pre-cached on users’ phones. This has increased viewership massively.

For the campaign SHAREit worked on for a brand in UP, the platform got feedback that their watch time and unique reach was equal to, if not better, than YouTube. “YouTube is the creme-de-la-creme of the video platforms in the country. And we are achieving numbers close to that, so it’s very exciting for us,” said Malhotra.

Today the platform only supports content from API feeds and from partners like a Viacom, or an Alt Balaji or Hungama, companies they have done large contracts with, or platforms that have short-form content like Vimeo or YouTube.

SHAREit also has to be sensible about monetising the content because a lot of brands are very conscious of the content where their brand is shown. “So we don’t plan in the short term or medium term to get into UGC in India, because I don’t think we are ready, to be honest,” said Malhotra.

For vernacular content, 85% of SHAREit’s monthly active user base is non-English, and it is primarily a vernacular platform. In India, there is a difference between the language the users want their app in versus the language of the content they want their app in.

Typically because of the sharing journey, OTT and SHAREit now walk hand-in-hand. It is working with the likes of YouTube, YouTube Go, Amazon Prime through this journey.

The stickiness factor

Previously SHAREit was only a sharing platform (before it started streaming content as well) and it is a very difficult part of the market to achieve. There are only two platforms in the sharing space in India -- SHAREit and WhatsApp. 

And the reason why these networks exist is that both are very sticky -- networks are almost impossible to replace. You must have seen 100 competitors of WhatsApp trying to enter the market in the last few years, and no one has really been able to match them. “That’s because once a network is established, it is very hard to dethrone it,” said Malhotra.

"The value chain of content has four parts -- discovery, consumption, acquisition and sharing. “If we extend ourselves to the value chain or the user to discover, to consume, to acquire and to share, then we create a very beautiful seamless-user experience,” said Malhotra. SHAREit does not have any user-generated content on the platform. To the extent that they were very sensitised when user-generated content was permitted in India; they did a lot of content checking and content auditing.

The rate of app uninstallation in India is the highest in the world. That’s why a lot of OTT platforms turn to SHAREit, claims Malhotra. 

"Even Amazon Prime Video, when they got ‘Thugs of Hindostan’ in a digital exclusive, they did a lot of marketing for that on SHAREit. Even ‘Made In Heaven’, one of their content pieces, was promoted through SHAREit. It’s one of their ways to generate the distribution. OTT platforms look at SHAREit as a genuine platform of reach and distribution. They know that a lot of platforms cannot reach the markets that it reaches," he adds.

SHAREit is not considering content creation as one of its offerings. The company thinks that their strength is in distribution and not in creation. “We cannot give content its due because we don’t attract that talent of creators,” emphasised Malhotra. So that’s why you’ll never see big platforms like YouTube, Facebook and SHAREit getting into creation.

The growth potential

Does Malhotra think that brands are utilising content distribution platforms like SHAREit to their full potential? Not at all, he feels. One of the issues is that our country is so large that sometimes platforms struggle to identify and understand the length and breadth of content consumption. Even though SHAREit is one of the top three platforms in the country, people don’t know what SHAREit is.

“Our platform has grown organically and not typically in Delhi and Mumbai, we haven’t grown top down. It also depends on how much we are living in big cities. We have to make an effort to understand the digital users coming from small-town India; the apps on their phone are totally different,” mentioned Malhotra.

Malhotra thinks that brands don’t use platforms like SHAREit because they are all learning. SHAREit is learning as much about the user as the brands are. “The marketers are unaware of the content processes and the likes and dislikes of marketing opportunities like SHAREit to really reach the audiences. So it’s like education for all of us to change the eco-system,” he said.

Talking about their pricing, SHAREit is priced in line with the market movers and shakers, pointed out Malhotra. Someone like YouTube, by definition, defines benchmark. Platforms like SHAREit can’t survive if they are too overpriced. He added, “India has both supply and demand. You can’t overprice yourself in India, because if you do, there are alternatives. Also, the percentage of content behind the paywall is tiny. Look at Netflix and Amazon’s numbers; we are not even talking single-digit million users across platforms."

In a large part of India, almost three-fourth of the content consumed is less than two minutes of length. Only a quarter of the content consumed is longer than that (longer pieces of content). SHAREit’s largest market is India, followed by others like Indonesia, South Africa, Middle East and Russia.

So the other difference between India and other markets is that in India, too much content is available for free. And the subscription market in India is too small. And then you have to figure out other ways to make money. “The ad market still has very low CPMs because we have more digital inventory than we have digital ad dollars. So that’s a slow but growing market,” said Malhotra.

Despite high growth, the platform is still finding it difficult to monetise in India. "There is high competition and low monetisation, and too much diversity in language here. I would say it’s the world’s toughest market, that’s how it is different,” said Malhotra.