Dailyhunt & Josh's parent co sees 149% jump in FY21 revenue

Bengaluru-headquartered VerSe Innovation, which owns and operates news aggregator Dailyhunt and short-video platform Josh, has registered a 149% increase in revenue at Rs 666.1 crore for the fiscal ended 31st March, 2021, against Rs 267.6 crore recorded in the previous fiscal.

According to the company's financial data, accessed by business intelligence platform Tofler, other income jumped 151% to Rs 105.6 crore from Rs 42 crore. Total income rose 149% to Rs 771.8 crore from Rs 309.7 crore.

VerSe Innovation derives its revenue from online advertisement and subscription services through its Dailyhunt application and web application.

Meanwhile, the net loss also swelled 97% to Rs 807.9 crore from Rs 410.2 crore and the total expenses zoomed 119% to Rs 1579.7 crore from Rs 720 crore. Employee benefit expense was up 24% to Rs 191.5 crore from Rs 155.2 crore. The company saw advertising promotional expenses going up 59% to Rs 591.3 crore from Rs 372.9 crore.

As per the annual filing, the company's proceeds from issuing shares shot up to Rs 1,934.1 crore from Rs 20.5 crore. During the fiscal, the proceeds from issuing other equity instruments was nil as compared to Rs 143.7 crore a year ago.

Total cash and cash equivalents surged to Rs 1268.4 crore from Rs 133.79 crore.

Queries sent to Ver Se Innovation remains unanswered till the time of filing this report.

In a recent interaction with exchange4media, VerSe Innovation Chief Revenue Officer Sunil Kumar Mohapatra had said that the Dailyhunt app has 350+ million monthly active users (MAUs) in over 15 languages. Josh, on the other hand, has 139 million MAUs with 50% of its users coming to the platform on a daily basis. The short-video platform, which was launched in July 2020, is available in 12 languages.

"Dailyhunt offers brands the opportunity to engage with Bharat, that is, the India that doesn’t reside in only in cities and doesn’t speak English. We currently run ads on our platform and are hence giving brands access to our 350 million-plus user base that uses the internet and consume content in their preferred local languages," Mohapatra had stated.

On the expansion plans for Dailyhunt, Mohapatra had said that the idea is to go deeper into languages, investing a lot more into product, going very deep into hyperlocal content, and beefing up our AI/ML to cater to growing Indian language users who are our core focus area.

Speaking about the monetisation opportunities on Josh, he had pointed out that there are plentiful of revenue and monetization opportunities in local language content. "Our nation-wide creator community covers a wide variety of niches, enabling us to reach millions across the country. For advertisers, short-form videos and influencer marketing offer exciting opportunities to reach their consumers in an authentic way. We’ve seen an uptake from FMCG, retail, beauty, telcos and OEMs. As we grow and introduce new features on the app, we expect more categories to be included in our ambit," he had said.