ShareChat sees user-generated, regional content as a big draw

Home-grown regional language social media platform, ShareChat, is looking at a larger play in user-generated content as it eyes tie-ups with over-the-top-players (OTT) and professional content providers.

The three-year-old Bengaluru based company, with investors such as Xiaomi and Shunwei Capital, is plans to host a variety of regional content.

With OTTs, it eyes content distribution. The platform claims to have a monthly user-base of 25 million and 60 million downloads. ShareChat has offerings in 14 regional languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi, Odia, Bengali, Kannada and Gujarati.Hindi users make up its highest subscriber-base, followed by Tamil and Telugu .

According to Sunil Kamath, Chief Business Officer, the company is investing in infrastructure that include cloud-services and data storage to improve user experience and enable higher consumer engagement as well as content creation.

Original content addition is another segment that ShareChat is looking at. In February, the company tied up with Hera Pheri Films (HPF) to have an original series. More regional content is now being produced by HPF to be screened on the platform.

Monetisation

“We are looking at both professional and user-generated content, especially regional ones. We are also in talks with OTT players for content distribution,” he told BusinessLine.

Incidentally, ShareChat does not generate any revenue at the moment and Kamath says there is still 12 months time before it can think of monetisation of the platform. At present, the focus is on customer acquisition. It has so far raised $124 million.

While native language social media platforms are in nascent stages in India, the concept has been quite successful in China.

Market sources point out that in India there are nearly 234 million regional language users as compared to 175 million English language users.