Indian short form apps have a monetisation opportunity of $19 billion by 2030: Redseer

Indian short form apps have a monetisation opportunity of $19 billion by 2030, and by 2025 they are expected to double their monthly active user base to 600 million, as per strategy consulting firm Redseer Strategy Consultants. 

As per the firm, this growth is largely attributed to the fact that Indians are heavy users of mobile entertainment and spend close to 156 minutes per day viewing entertainment content on their smartphones.

Further, the Redseer report also states that the next wave of internet growth is likely to come from Tier-2 cities and beyond regions which have a higher propensity to view shortform videos.

It adds that the rapidly improving quality of content and algorithms for Indian short form apps is another significant driver of growth. 

As far as India’s short form sector is concerned, it is expected to witness close to 600 million monthly active users by 2025, which will be 67% of all smartphone users.  

“Indian short form apps are witnessing phenomenal growth as compared to other established platforms, this can be attributed to their low decision fatigue, language localisation, recommendations, genre variety and local creator influence. In fact, on average, an Indian user consumes close to 38 minutes of short form content each day,” said Mohit Rana, partner at Redseer.  

Redseer believes that the Indian apps are now poised to start monetising their large and engaged user base through advertising, video commerce and to a lesser extent, gifting.

The report concluded that by 2030, shortform can take close to 10-20% of the overall digital ad pie. Further, video-led commerce in short form apps is another big opportunity; and China is a testimony to this given that in the last four years alone, video led commerce in China grew 100X.  

As per the report, by 2030, the penetration of Short Form amongst total smartphone users will increase from the current 46% to 80%. It adds that the three main monetisation levers will be advertising, video-commerce and gifting.