ShareChat looks to grab a slice of political advertisement pie

Social media and networking platform ShareChat, which boasts of 160 million users across 15 Indic languages, is looking at political advertisements as part of its revenue monetisation strategy. The platform is running a pilot campaign with the AIADMK party and DMK in Tamil Nadu for the state assembly polls. The state will go to the polls on 6th April.

ShareChat is experimenting with political advertising as part of its focus on ad-based revenue monetisation mode. To enable this, ShareChat has launched an ad transparency portal adstransparency.sharechat.com.

It is also a part of the Election Commission of India (ECI) voluntary code of ethics. On 20th March 2019, ShareChat along with other social media platforms signed the Voluntary Code of Ethics under the aegis of the Internet and Mobile Association of India.

"Currently, ShareChat is running a pilot campaign with AIADMK and DMK in Tamil Nadu for the upcoming State Elections in the first week of April," an industry source told exchange4media. The source added that ShareChat will look at offering this model to various political parties nationally with elections knocking in 4 states and UTs.

"With ShareChat being dominant in all the 4 states with Indic language focus, it expects to garner immense interests among political parties to design their language-led election campaigns for reaching out to the possible voters," the source noted.

ShareChat is available in 15 Indic languages including Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, and Assamese.

During the 2019 Lok Sabha General Elections, ShareChat was directed to take down 31 pieces of content via lawful order from the Election Commission of India that violated electoral laws in India. It took down all 31 pieces within a time span of 30 minutes of receiving the notice.