March 28, 2023, India: ShareChat, India’s leading multilingual social media platform, announces that the platform crossed a significant milestone as it recorded over 1 billion virtual gifts being sent on ShareChat Live in the year 2022. The most number of gifts were sent in Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi in ShareChat Audio ChatRooms.
A pioneer and an industry leader in the ChatRooms space in the country, ShareChat is the largest platform that offers the concept of ‘gifts’ as a token of appreciation shared by the users to the creators. The popularity of virtual gifting, a form of micro transactions, has seen the number of monthly unique transactors double since December 2021, resulting in a 3X increase in revenue from virtual gifts. ShareChat expects to continue this growth in 2023 as well. In fact, some creators have found the ChatRooms to be a viable career choice and earn well over ₹1 lakh per month.
ShareChat’s virtual gifts are culturally inspired and come in 3D, thereby adding to the uniqueness of the gamification, and improving creator and gifter gratification on ShareChat Live. They range from a simple rose or a teddy bear and to more elaborate gifts like the Taj Mahal, which are media-rich, occupy the entire screen, and have a longer display time than other gifts.
ShareChat Live has been embraced nationwide and consumed in multiple languages. Most popular audio ChatRooms are those with devotional sessions like Bhakti Sandhya, Bhajan sessions, Gurbani sessions, that see a large participation of 1000s of users per day. Users celebrate birthdays of their favorite celebrities, discuss movie launches and new songs on these ChatRooms. The audience for sessions with celebrities discussing their movie launches have seen lakhs of users participating. Some of the popular celebrity sessions included Alia Bhatt and Ranbir Kapoor promoting their movie Bhramastra through ChatRooms in 2022, Radhika Apte for Vikram Vedha, Sandhguru interacting with audiences about the global movement – ‘Save The Soil’. As part of ShareChat’s CricChat Season 2, former cricketers including Mohammad Kaif, Sanjay Manjrekar, Murali Kartik, Parthiv Patel, Akash Chopra, and Venkatesh Iyer spoke on the platform’s ChatRooms about their careers and learnings.
One of the most popular ongoing Kannada ChatRooms on the platform is Namma Adda, which invites actors, singers, journalists, doctors, and lyricists to conduct sessions. Popular Tamil actors like Radha Ravi and Sathish Muthukrishnan, Telugu stars Nithya Menon, and singers like Sriramachandra and Karthik have also engaged on audio ChatRooms on the platform. Each of these sessions sees an average of 50k to 100k audience
Commenting on the announcement, Manohar Singh Charan, CFO, ShareChat and Moj stated, “Being the first and the largest live entertainment and virtual gifting platform in the country, ShareChat extends a unique opportunity to the creators to build a regular source of income through their creativity. The creators use their talent to provide quality content and host interesting conversations, making ShareChat a home to the most trending content on the internet. This milestone of over 1 billion virtual gifts in one year is a testament to ShareChat’s popularity and highly engaging and relevant content, where consumers appreciate the creative content through paid gifts at a large scale. It also displays ShareChat’s commitment towards continued innovation, which will help us build sticky user behaviors and solidify ShareChat’s position as the preferred home-grown social media app in the country.”
