Homegrown short-videos apps are attracting investors as they look to gain users on the back of TikTok’s ban in India.
Meanwhile, Reliance is eyeing a slew of acquisitions as it looks to expand the scope of its ecommerce offerings.
Short-video funding
Homegrown short-video apps Trell and Mitron have raised funding as the sector witnessed unprecedented demand from users following the ban of Bytedance-owned TikTok.
While Trell has picked up $11.4 million from KTB Network, Samsung Ventures, Firebolt Ventures along with existing investors Sequoia’s Surge, Fosun RZ Capital, Mitron has raised around $5 million led by Nexus Venture Partners.
Chingari landed $1.3 million last week while Bolo Indya had raised $300,000 from Eagle10 Ventures, India Accelerator Group, and high net worth individuals earlier this month.
Facebook’s short video test
Social networking giant Facebook is also doubling down on short videos. After launching Instagram Reels across 50 markets earlier this month and briefly piloting a standalone app Lasso, the company is now testing short-form videos in its flagship app in India, it confirmed to TechCrunch.
That said, monetisation remains a key challenge in the country which is still a user-led market, unlike more mature markets like China and the United States. There is also uncertainty over continued adoption for these apps if the ban on TikTok is lifted in the country. ET reported last week that Reliance is in early-stage talks to buy TikTok’s India operations, even as Microsoft is reportedly negotiating a deal to buy the short-video app’s global operations.
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Reliance’s e-comm acquisitions
Reliance is also looking to pick up online commerce startups to boost its ecommerce play. The oil-to-telecom conglomerate is in talks to acquire online furniture brand Urban Ladder and milk delivery platform Milkbasket, The Times of India reported.
Reliance is in talks to buy lingerie retailer Zivame and Chennai-based e-pharmacy startup Netmeds, as it looks to expand the scale of its ecommerce offerings. Last month, Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani had said that they are accelerating the rollout of its new commerce initiative JioMart to cover other sectors including electronics, fashion, pharmaceutical, and healthcare.
India’s ecommerce industry is expected to reach $99 billion in size by 2024 when online commerce penetration will more than double to almost 11%, according to Goldman Sachs’ recent review of the sector.
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Facebook India & politics
Facebook’s India policy head Ankhi Das has filed a police complaint with Delhi Police saying she is receiving death threats, after the social networking giant came under fire over allegations of political bias in the country.
What’s the matter?
This move comes after The Wall Street Journal reported that senior Facebook executives had allegedly opposed applying hate speech rules to posts by BJP leader T Raja Singh and three others, although their posts were flagged internally for promoting violence.
The report quoted current and former Facebook employees as saying that Ankhi Das opposed strict intervention and that this was part of a broader pattern of favouritism by Facebook towards BJP and ‘Hindu hardliners’.
Amit Malviya, national head, information and technology for BJP, however, had dismissed these allegations, saying it is ludicrous to suggest that Facebook is amenable to the BJP and the wider conservative ecosystem.
Meanwhile, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology will look into this matter, chairman Shashi Tharoor said on Twitter. Read more.
Urban India‘s desktop shift
India’s urban professionals are shifting back to desktops from mobiles amid the pandemic, as hundreds of thousands of them relinquish their “always on the move” tag to work from home.
App- or mobile-first Internet companies told ET their web traffic from tier 1 cities grew considerably compared to pre-lockdown days. Urban Indians spending more time in front of ‘permanent’ devices like PCs and laptops is also affecting the kind of content people read and share because of the kind of screen they are using.
For instance, Spotify saw a 37% increase in listeners using the desktop version of its app in urban India between April and June compared with 7% growth between November 2019 and January 2020.
Read: Covid-19 lockdown is changing how people listen to music on Spotify
New desktop features
This trend coincides with tech companies Facebook and Twitter rolling out features to improve the user experience for its web apps. Facebook-owned Instagram rolled out direct messaging for its web version in April while WhatsApp introduced the dark mode for its web version and desktop app in early July. Twitter has also rolled out a separate pop-up window for direct messages on its web version. Read more.
Google & Australia govt’s war of words
Internet giant Google sparred with Australia’s competition watchdog over the newly proposed pay-for-news regulation.
This comes after the Australian government stated plans to make tech giants like Google and Facebook pay for news and provided them a time period of three months to negotiate a fair payment with Australian media businesses for news content. The government is pushing for these regulations after the pandemic created an advertising revenue crisis for several media companies in the country.
What are they saying?
Google: In an open letter, Google warned users in Australia that the government’s proposed regulation could hurt how they use Google Search and YouTube. It claims that this regulation would lead to data of users “being handed over to big news businesses” and would put the free services they use “at risk in Australia.” Read more.
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission: In response, the watchdog said the letter contains “misinformation” about the draft code. “Google will not be required to share any additional user data with Australian news businesses unless it chooses to do so.” Read more.
Paying for news
In July, Google announced that it would pay some select, “high-quality” news publishers to license their content for a service expected to launch later this year, CNBC reported.
Facebook had also announced in October last year that it would pay a select set of publishers in a bid to “encourage better quality content” on the platform through a dedicated tab called Facebook News. The section was rolled out across the United State in June this year.
Read: ET Explains: Making internet majors pay for news content they make money from
(Illustrations by Rahul Awasthi)
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