BWDisrupt interacted with Shalini Tewari, CEO Viral Shots to know more about their new ventures.Tell us about the micro content app. and genesis of idea?ViralShots is a short content app that brings unique, trending and fun stories from around the world. The entire universe focuses on the same mainline stories whereas the vision behind ViralShots was to bring difficult-to-discover, differentiated infotainment content that people would love to read and share, in a crisp format.
How Viral Shots is different its competitors and how do you view them?
ViralShots does not have any direct competition. Most of the destinations bring the usual mainstream news and stories. ViralShots is the first non-news micro content destination that curates stories from over 500 destinations in 6 languages. Our variety of stories has emotion stirring flavours in a very refreshing manner. Complete boredom buster on the go!
What are the challenges you have faced post the launch of Viral Shots and how have you dealt with it?
The biggest challenge in the non-funded environment was to put an exceptional technology team together that could work on multiple facets to bring unique experience for the users. Right from curation engine for unparalleled content genre to the exceptional UX and robust backend for fast and seamless experience, we were obsessed about the quality of the user experience. This shall remain to be the greatest driver for the ViralShots team always.
How do you see the micro-content industry evolving in India? What is the future ahead for this category?
The writing is pretty clear on the wall. Users now like crisp, snaky information. Both due to information overload and diminishing time at hand, users want quick, crisp and unique information from a destination. Twitter for one, is a great example of micro content success story. It’s still going to change multi-folds. Destinations now will really have to work beyond just vanilla content serving to keep the users engaged creatively.
Do you see Indian mobile users shifting to micro content apps for their daily dose of news?
Millennials (ages 18-34) are the age group with the highest mobile usage, with a near-universal 97 percent reporting they use a mobile platform to consume all digital content. The generation is always on the move and with decreasing attention span. Micro content certainly is getting huge acceptance in this segment of users and content consumption patterns are definitely going to be redefined.
Where do you see Viral Shots in next three years?
ViralShots will be nothing like it is today in next 3 years. It is nothing like it was 1 year back at the time of its inception. And this necessarily does not mean only the User Interface but also the technology, the intelligence, edginess the team is obsessed about.
ViralShots was one of the last entrants in the News and Magazine category on Google Playstore. It’s at 450 million screen views per month and growing month on month. We experience a whopping 110+ Screen views per user per day that is unprecedented in the content category with approx. 20 minutes time spent / user. Other players in the category including News destinations are shifting to follow a lot of stuff we do at ViralShots and that only makes our belief system more robust.
By Q1 2017, ViralShots shall cross 1 billion screen views per month with over 25 minutes average time spent per user. We aspire to touch 5 billion screen views per month within next 3 years and take
We are coming up with our next “Big Release” in next few weeks. The release is based on extensive market insights and there is great technology play where we aspire to make the user journey phenomenal.
Currently, you are available in six languages? How is the response in vernacular languages? Are you planning to come up with more languages in near future?The number of regional Internet users in India touched 127 million last year and is growing rapidly with the competitive plans offered by the telcos .
Hindi digital content itself overall has grown by about 94%.
We clearly see this trend translating into the content consumption pattern on ViralShots. All actions points are drastically high for the vernacular users. Given the response, we feel the need to get deeper into the user psychographic as where we have gotten, it’s just the tip of the ice-berg. We have had a great start here and unparalleled learning experience. Looking at the engagement and user response, we definitely are bullish about getting more in-depth with Vernacular languages.
Can you please share your monetization model with us, and the current traction details?
The mission for ViralShots since inception was to build exceptional user growth and traffic. It’s obvious to get tempted for quick revenue once good traffic starts to build up. We at ViralShots shall not focus on that aspect immediately. We are testing numerous models for monetization sparingly but we shall go all out when the right time comes. ViralShots team is driven by entrepreneurs who have built serial successful businesses. We know how to build revenue. Timing is the most essential ingredient for the same.
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BW Reporters
Soumya is a young writer and journalist, with bachelors in Multimedia and Mass Communication. She is an alumini of the Asian College of Journalism, and finds politics and sustainability intriguing beats to work with.
