Snapchat has reached the milestone of 100 million users monthly in India, Snap Co-Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel announced at Snap Inc’s virtually hosted the second edition of “Snap in India” even on Wednesday.

The event focused on Snap’s growing community of Indian partners, creators, brands, storytellers and users which it calls ‘Snapchatters.’

“We have made significant investments to localise the Snapchat experience for the Indian community. We have added culturally relevant content, developed highly active and creative local creator communities, and invested in local products, marketing initiatives, and language support,” said Spiegel.

“Following these efforts to bring a localized experience to Indian Snapchatters, we now reach 100 million Snapchatters monthly in India. We will continue to anchor our efforts around celebrating local culture and talent while empowering, growing, and providing resources for our community of Indian creators,” he added.

Bobby Murphy, Snap Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer highlighted the importance of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences on Snapchat that have helped the company engage with partners, creators, and Snapchatters around the country.

“Augmented reality is at the core of Snapchat’s offerings in India. We have worked towards empowering students and youth with essential AR Skills through workshops and lensathons,” said Murphy.

“We aim to partner with more local creators in India to grow the number of incredible experiences available to Snapchatters. At Snap, our intent is to make AR more accessible, useful and practical than ever before,” Murphy added.

At “Snap in India 2021” event, Snap Inc highlighted a range of India-focused investments to further strengthen localised experiences for Snapchatters, creators and partners.

Partnerships

India is now the first and only market where Snapchat has distribution partnerships with all the top Android OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), which total over 100 million devices in the country, the company said.

It also highlighted partnerships with Samsung Mobile which has launched a “Fun Mode” feature to bring some of Snap’s AR-powered Lenses to their native camera app, and extended this partnership locally with their “Made in India” M Series smartphones. It has also partnered with Google for its upcoming JioPhone Next.

India is the second-largest and fastest growing market for Bitmoji, Snap’s personalised emoji app. It has partnered with short-video platform osh to enable the platform’s users to add Bitmoji stickers to videos.

The company has also partnered with e-commerce platform Flipkart. This will be an India-first e-commerce partnership for Snap, and Snap’s Camera Kit will be an integral part of Flipkart’s “Camera Storefront”.

Snap Map, which serves as a personal map for users has entered into a partnership with Zomato.

“This is the first Snap Map partnership in India, and Snapchatters will have access to restaurant information and be able to place food orders right from their personal Map on Snapchat,” it said.

Content partnerships

It also highlighted its effort related to content and content partnerships. Snap has curated made-for-mobile shows with a commitment to offering entertaining, local content.

“To strengthen its commitment to offer relevant content to Indian Snapchatters, Snap is doubling down on Original series in India with fresh, original, exclusive, local content to watch and enjoy, and has commissioned over 120 episodes of new content for 2022,” it said.

The company has also partnered with some of India’s leading entertainment channels, including Sony Entertainment Television and Zee TV, to offer curated content.

Currently, Snapchat’s “Discover” content section has 70 local Indian channels across news, fitness, fashion, entertainment and comedy, publishing premium content on Snap in 2021. This is more than 200 per cent over Q2 of 2020.

This led to total daily time spent by users in India on the platform watching shows and publisher content increasing by 150 per cent YoY (Q2 ‘21 vs. Q2 ‘20), with over 125 million unique viewers have watched a show in India on Snapchat.

Creators

It has also introduced features like Gifting and the Creator Marketplace for creators in India.

Earlier this year, it had extended its creator-focused initiative Spotlight to Indian users. Since its launch in India in March 2021, the daily Spotlight story view time has quadrupled, it said.

Creators i.e. “Snap Stars” in India will nowaccess to Gifting, a new monetisation opportunity that will allow them to receive a share of the revenue from Gifts they receive from their fans through Story Replies.

The platform has recently launched Creator Marketplace, which allows brands to connect with creators directly and pay them to produce branded content with 100 per cent of the transaction going to the creator.

“AR Lens Creators in India are currently participating, and it will be rolling out to Snap Stars in India soon,” it said.

Snap will also launch a free, early-stage founder focused program in India: Yellow Tree Bootcamp.

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