After crossing 1 crore (10 million) app downloads in 18 months, microblogging platform Koo aims to touch 100 million downloads in the next year, fuelled by its expansion in multiple languages.

“A lot of his growth will come from language expansion, the more the community grows, the more people share posts about us and the platform's reach grows. Eventually, creating a snowball effect. The app starts showing high up on the play store, the number of downloads increases and a lot of people start talking about the platform,” co-founder Mayank Bidawatka told BusinessLine.

Founded by serial entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Bidawatka, Koo is currently available in 8 languages including Hindi, Kannada, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bangla, and English. Among these eight languages, 20 per cent-25 per cent of posts on Koo are in English and others are in vernacular languages. The Koo App plans to soon add Gujarati and Punjabi to its list of languages.

Building language-based communities is a core aspect of Koo, something that they hope to replicate in global markets as well. Koo App is already available in Nigeria and the company is now planning to expand to other countries as well. The expansion will prioritize regions where, apart from English, other languages form part of the day-to-day conversations.

“Most of the products that are available today are global products, that have been designed for the English-speaking world. So a lot of people feel alienated by those products because they can't find their language communities. We have created a very emotional experience in the Indian languages for now and this particular proposition can also be taken to the world,” Bidawatka said.

He added that English-speaking nations are largely the United States, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and beyond these countries, most of the world has some local language or speaks multiple languages.

Further, between February and August 2021, Koo saw 85 lakh users (8.5 million) download the Koo App. The company had earlier reported a huge spike in users in February 2021, when Twitter was caught in a clash with the Indian government.

Engagement rates

Commenting on Koo’s engagement numbers during this time, Bidawatka said, “We have probably one of the highest engagement rates in social media. A very high percentage of the people comment, like, share, follow people, all of that, because we've actually made the interface very easy. For instance, the follow button is made to blink on the Koo app. We have made it very obvious for vernacular India, to understand which button to click and what they should be doing, how they can like, etc.” Almost 20 per cent of Koo’s user base are said to be posting their opinions on the app.

As the number of users on a social media platform grows, the need for content moderation also increases. Companies like Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitter spend billions to review content daily. While some of these big tech companies outsource these functions, others employ huge teams of content moderators. And yet, moderating multiple language content remains a challenge for these big tech companies. Because what might seem like innocent phrasing in English might be hurtful hate speech in another language.

However, Bidawatka claims to have built in-house competencies to tackle content moderation in multiple languages. “We are largely a tech company and tech enables a lot of things like this. Our machine learning keeps getting stronger to find highly problematic posts. It's very difficult to moderate everything, you can't possibly do that. Such an effort would require thousands of people and even large tech actually outsources a lot of this work, but we have built in-house competencies. We have got a good hang of this in a very short span of time.”

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