Dailyhunt’s hunt for your attention

In April last year, VerSe Innovation, the parent firm of news aggregator app Dailyhunt and short video app Josh, created news in a difficult funding environment, by raising $805 Mn at a whopping valuation of $ 5Bn in their Series J round. This was a significant jump from the last raise at $3 Bn eight months before.

VerSe Innovation, through the dailyhunt app, has built one of the largest ad-tech businesses in India. Dailyhunt, formerly Newshunt, has been in existence since 2009, and has over the years built significant traction, through their early mover USP of aggregating and personalizing snackable byte size news & content in over 14 Indian languages. In a way Dailyhunt broke the chasm of non-english vernacular audiences being non-monetisable.

The company claimed back then to have a creator ecosystem of over 100,000 content partners, 350 million users, with significantly higher monthly view time per user than Youtube & facebook.

Dailyhunt’s financials & traction, was analysed critically at the time of fundraise last year, as this article from The Ken suggests, to be circumspect about the daily active users (DAU), the operating revenue, and average time spent by user on platform.

Even if the quoted traction numbers are revised on a lower side, the platform has been an undisputed market leader in the vernacular internet space. This led to the choice of strategic path, as discussed in this article – whether Dailyhunt can beat Facebook in India?

Google and Facebook have globally dominated the ad-revenue model with ~ 80% market share. India’s digital advertising market is pegged at $2.8 Bn in 2021, compared to $70 Bn in China and $140 Bn in the US, with mobile ads accounting for 60% of the total ad spend. The Indian market is growing at ~30% per annum.

Vernacular internet content consumers were projected to cover half of INdia’s population (~560 Mn) by 2021, with a growth rate of 120% between 2016-21, whereas English language users were forecasted to grow by just 14% reaching close to 200Mn.

Facebook started as a ‘social’ aggregation platform which means content on FB was primarily driven by user networks. Over the years, the social content has moved on to whatsapp & Instagram, facebook’s most ubiquitous and powerful feature ‘newsfeed’ has transformed from ‘socially aggregated content to ‘interest’ aggregated content. This has been termed as the platform convergence where networks with social origins – Facebook/Linkedin – are increasingly gravitating towards interest driven networks for ads.

Dailyhunt by design is a localised ‘interest’ driven newsfeed network for running ads. The prime currency of such a network is capturing the lion’s share of user ‘attention’. The limited daily amount of which is being contested by content platforms, social networks, print & electronics media.

Capturing user attention has its pitfalls which bring us to the fundamental paradox inherent in platforms like Dailyhunt. The paradox is that to obtain maximum user engagement, the content strategy drifts towards churning click-bait articles or news.

Out of curiosity I installed the dailyhunt app and selected the Hindi language. The content on the feed, though sourced from hindi newspapers or digital publications, tends to be sensational, often provocative, and geared towards entertainment rather than serious news.

User attention obtained through click-bait news extracts a significant personal and societal cost. We should all be mindful of this phenomenon.

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