By Tanya Agarwal
DailyHunt, the news and local language content application raised INR168 crore (US$25 million) in its Series D funding, led by Chinese content provider ByteDance. The funding had participation from Sequoia Capital India and Matrix Partners India and from some of its past investors, including Omidyar Network, Falcon Edge and former Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin.
With over 155 million app installs, the app offers 100,000 news articles in 14 languages, licensed from over 800 publication partners every day. The DailyHunt group has more than 50 million users, spending over 6 billion minutes on the service every month. It operates using deep-learning technology and unique machine learning, which enables smart curation of its content. It also tracks user preferences to deliver real-time, personalised content and notifications. The app currently serves a dozen languages including English, Urdu, Odia, Bhojpuri, Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Nepali, Bengali, Telugu, Malayalam, Tamil.
DailyHunt is serving a huge, unmet need of providing local language content to Indian mobile users. It has grown with its localized approach ad-business model, quoted Zhang Yiming, the founder of ByteDance, the company operating recommendation platforms like TopBuzz in the US, Brazil and Toutiao in China.
Marketing strategies
With the increasing popularity of the internet, more Indians are accessing news on their smartphones, much of which is available on Facebook and Twitter. However, many still prefer accessing news content in vernacular languages and that is where the market of DailyHunt lies.
Virendra Gupta says, “As the market gets diverse, there is a greater need to personalize content. We need to talk to them in their language.” According to him, language, strata and states should make the base of the content. India is linguistically diverse. Many Indian languages are, however, under-served by the web. For instance, some Indian languages are not available on Google Translate. This is because of the sparse traffic they create from underdeveloped areas of the country. Languages such as Oriya, Bhojpuri and Assamese need extra attention. However, it would be false to assume that these languages dont exist on the web. One can argue that writing more content in those languages would give a bigger audience.
Problems faced by DailyHunt
Overcoming the multiple issues it faced during its earlier stages was not easy. The first obstacle was trying to get regional fonts on a smartphone. However, rendering engine solved this problem by displaying local language fonts on most mobile handsets. According to BCG, only about a quarter of rural users in India have smartphones. These also could connect only through 2G and 3G networks. Keeping in mind all these factors, the app was made feasible to work on cheaper devices affordable even by people in the smallest towns. DailyHunt kept the app size down to 10 MB, so that more users would download it and stripped the size of images so that articles could load faster.
Getting experienced executives on board
The local language entertainment aggregator roped in Umang Bedi as the President. The former managing director of Facebook for India and South Asia will report to founder Virendra Gupta and will help scale up the revenues and user base of the platform. We will focus on three metrics – increasing the number of users, how we can grow engagement and revenue. DailyHunt can differentiate to win market share in the advertising space. It can be an independent platform of scale, Bedi said. Before this, he led Indian business at multi-national companies like Adobe, Intuit and Symantec. He left Facebook in January. Umangs background in social media content and experience leading scaled teams generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues is a great fit with our plans. To fight the big boys, you need experienced executives like him, said Gupta.
DailyHunt aims to capture about 10% of the Indian digital advertising market in the coming years. It is right now pegged at about $2-2.5 billion. Search engine giant Google and Facebook currently capture about 80-85% of this market and are also developing products for the local language users. A study by KPMG and Google titled Indian languages Defining Indias Internet highlights that by 2021, regional language users will account for 75% of Indias internet user base. According to the report, 90% of the new internet users in India in the next five years will be Indian language users growing by 230% to 536 million users in 2021.
Introduction of Newzly and other products
Dailyhunt has also been expanding its product suite. It recently introduced Newzly, a news-in-brief app. This nine-lingual app competes with startups like InShorts and Times Internets NewsPoint. Newzly provides trending news articles across multiple genres. These include entertainment, business, sports, among other sectors. The idea is to get into more video options soon too. Eventually to create a family of apps that cater to all kinds of users, in the language of their choice. It will also focus on increasing personalization for the user, based on their interests, said Gupta.
With Newzly, consumers can also customise their feed based on topics of interest. They can bookmark cards and share stories on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The basic idea is to serve the needs of users who have less time on hand and want to stay updated with the summary of major breaking and trending news. Prior to Newzly, Dailyhunt also launched other products such as its progressive web app Dailyhunt Lite (November 2017). It has also partnered with Vuclip and YuppTV to offer original videos and Live TV on its platform.
DailyHunt has grown by partnering with publishers, developers, advertisers and other ecosystem partners, The investment by ByteDance reinforces our belief in the opportunity,” says Virendra Gupta who has put his heart and soul to take this startup to the level it has reached right now.
Featured Image Source: Visual Hunt