What content opportunities Bigo has to offer brands through Bigo Live and Likee

Internet company Bigo through its platforms — Bigo Live and Likee — provides a portfolio of video broadcast and VoIP-related products and services powered by advanced AI technology to users. With more than 400 million monthly active users in over 150 countries worldwide, Bigo has five R&D centres and over 20 offices around the globe.

To understand its huge portfolio and what new and innovative offerings the platform has in store for brands that are looking for content solutions, BuzzInContent.com had a chat with Nagesh Banga, Deputy Country Manager, Bigo Live.

Sharing how the platforms are building engagement for its users, Banga talked about their business model and why live streaming would have the next biggest stake in the digital ecosystem. 

Banga said Bigo Live, which he claimed is one of the biggest live streaming platforms, presents an opportunity for talent to be showcased to consumers aged between 16 and 25 years. While developing real-time engagement, audiences can send content creators stickers that are in-app purchases.

Likee provides a short video-editing tool for creators. The platform collaborates with brands for various campaigns and does movie/song integration using multiple hashtags, which ensures them a wide reach. Having collaborated with movies such as Chichore, Banga said that Likee, being activity and content-driven, makes sure content gets viral easily while running short-term campaigns for brands.

Nagesh Banga

“Users use this platform to make content more creative and if someone wants to become famous, Likee is the platform. We run a few hashtags activities that are related to brands, creating something around the same tagline for the user base. Then through our machine learning and AI, we do a lot of promotions inside our app to promote content. We send such content across our user base, which makes it go viral. So that is how we build engagement for the short video ecosystem, providing brands better opportunities,” he said.

“We don’t run any advertisements for brands on our apps. When we have other brands coming on board for branded content, it is a very surrogate thing. If a podcaster has brand integration in his/her video, we ensure it’s a soft engagement,” he said.

The platform provides brands detailed insights on the kind of the reach it incurs through its technology.

The platform lets users create their own content but at the same time, to maintain the quality and tonality of the platform, it bars anything that is illegal or capable of creating a controversy.

“We have a team of around 700 people to do content moderation for both the platforms and to keep a quality check on user-generated content (UGC). We have a pretty strong AI system, which is one of the most recognised in terms of moderation,” Banga said.

He vouches for their content operation team, the reach it provides for engagement and the kind of tools and special effects it offers via Likee.

For the Likee app, the company has been consistently promoting itself via metro branding and sponsoring at colleges along with internet marketing. For Bigo Live, apart from social media and CPI campaigns, it associates with a lot of its official podcasters who further reach out to their own communities.

The company believes there comes a time for any brand in the market when it has to start paying back to their customers or to start working for the uplift of local individuals. And for this very purpose, in the second quarter of this financial year, it launched a new tab in Bigo Live, which helps users understand the tech space better.

The company started its journey in 2017 in India and since then had been witnessing fair growth. When asked about its challenges, Banga said, “We got our moderation team of 100 people first here, and it took us some time to educate people as they confuse live streaming with live broadcasting. First we had to educate them and build this whole pool of talent. Now, users are matured enough to understand live streaming and short-format video.”

Explaining how the digital ecosystem is moving towards short-format videos, Banga said it seems like it is the future but as technology is very disruptive in nature, it would be difficult to assume anything.  

He said, “I believe that live streaming would have the biggest stakes in coming years. It has reach and it helps users/podcasters to earn money.”