VerSe innovation which also happens to be the parent company of content aggregator Dailyhunt has managed to generate over $100mn revenue from its short video app Josh less than two months after it managed to raise more than $100mn from Google, Microsoft, and AlphaWave. Josh app was launched by the company in September of 2020 to fill the market gap created by the TikTok ban. It managed to take its place among the many similar apps born during the period like MX TakaTak, Moj, Mitron, Trell, and Chingari. According to SensorTower, as of February 9, 2021, Josh was ranked 9th among the top free social android apps in India with MX TakaTak and Moj being the top two apps.
Verse, in their company statements, announced their plan of deploying more capital for the steady growth of the app that is as of now available in 12 Indian languages. They are planning on augmentation of local language content offerings, development of content creator ecosystem by innovations in AI and ML departments and their most important objective is to create more opportunities for India’s vast talent pool. The company has claimed content creators of around 200 or more, 10 music labels, and over 15 million user-generated content creators on the app. According to the company, the app has over 85 million active monthly users amongst whom 40 million are daily active users with 1.5 billion video plays per day.
Tiktok held 85-90 percent of the total monthly time spent by Indians on a short form app as of June 2020. Since its ban, it lost around 40 percent share to Indian apps by October 2020. The short video apps had witnessed a decline in monthly time spent by users to just 37 billion minutes in July 2020 but they captured 95 billion minutes by early December as per the report by RedSeer. 4-6 percent of about 165 billion minutes (275 hours) spent by Indian short form apps in June 2020 has increased by around 67 percent which would be approximately 55 billion minutes(91 hours) in October.
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