We already work with top 200 advertisers, now expanding base to next 2,000: Udit Sharma

ShareChat is India’s largest homegrown social media company boasting of 400+ million MAUs across all its platforms. The Bengaluru-based company was founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Bhanu Pratap Singh and Farid Ahsan. It  is valued at US$5 billion and has social media brands such as ShareChat App and Moj under its portfolio. The company also acquired MX Takatak in 2021 and raised $1.2 billion over the last two years.  

e4m spoke to company’s chief revenue officer Udit Sharma to understand his business strategy, challenges, achievements and expansion plans.

Excerpts: 

ShareChat always remains in the news for the right or wrong reasons. How does it feel to be at the helm of India’s largest homegrown social media platform?

Actually, anything that's worth the news will always remain in news for right or wrong reasons. But just to answer your question, it's really super exciting times for a platform like Sharechat and Moj. 

We are witnessing two underlying currents in our society right now. One is the emergence of new internet users in tier-2 and tier-3 towns of this country. These are people who are coming into the internet for the very first time and not so hell-bent on using English as their preferred language. They are more comfortable using their own mother tongue but they definitely want to take full advantage of what the internet has to offer. Thankfully, sharechat is rightly placed to tap into that behavior and take advantage of that and be able to offer a platform that actually speaks the language that people are comfortable in. And this is the reason 160 million people are coming on to the platform month after month and engaging with it. 

The second undercurrent is the emergence of short-form video. So, so many reports these days talk about how the attention span of the younger population of this country has actually gone down significantly. Depending on which report you're reading, it's running into 10 to 12 seconds. People actually have a higher propensity to spend time on platforms which can give them very engaging authentic short-form video content and that's something that Moj is really at the forefront of. From both Sharechat and Moj perspective, I feel totally privileged to be actually part of an ecosystem which is tapping into those two emerging consumer behaviors in the country. 

You are going to complete one year soon. What have been your major challenges and achievements so far? 

Prior to this, I was in the OTT world, which was a lot more organized and well-established. Short-form video is still an emerging narrative in our country. That is one of the things that got me excited  about joining Sharechat and Moj. So far, I think one of the biggest challenges has been to actually go out in the market and talk to marketeers, brand managers, category managers, industry leaders and and help them understand the power of short-form video in our country today. This has been a big challenge and that has been the most exciting part as well. 

A big chunk of our audiences are coming from tier 2 tier 3 markets, so talking to advertisers and telling them that you need to work with us and you need to be understanding the nuances of what kind of content those people are watching, what gets them excited, what are they interested in, bring about the contextual nature… those have been the more interesting challenges that I have seen in terms of achievements. 

We actually just clocked our largest ever revenue month in the history of ShareChat, something that any revenue leader will take a lot of pride in. Just moving beyond numbers, establishing a well-oiled sales machinery has been something that I've worked on for the last nine months or so that I've been here. So, now we have a very seasoned group of sales folks who are basically taking the Sharechat and Moj narrative out in the market. So, I would consider that as one of the big achievements. 

We would like you to share what was the highest revenue and for which month? Moreover, you mentioned the growth in tier-2 and tier-3 cities, so are you also going to focus on metro cities in your next phase of growth?

March was actually that month. Just to put in the context, in March, we actually did 2x of what we actually did in June of 2022. So you can imagine the growth that we have seen right now. 

On your other question about metros, actually I call this out a lot of times because we have done a pretty good job of establishing ShareChat as the market leader in tier 2 and tier 3 markets. 

People actually tend to forget that tier-1 in India itself is sort of subdivided into several categories. Talking about traffic in tier-1, we get a good 40-45 million people every month. 

That’s what we tell a lot of advertisers. If you are thinking of vernaculars, if you're thinking of talking to people in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bhojpuri Rajasthani, Punjabi, don't just think of tier-2 and tier 3 markets. You have to think of this as a tier-1 play as well because there's a sizable population in tier-1 one and in metros that are actually more comfortable using their native language, and in order for you to reach out to them, ShareChat is a tremendous platform for doing so. 

Moj is a totally different story. It is a more genZ platform which even today gets 45 per cent of the overall traffic from tier 1. 

The short-video market segment has a lot many players and the fight could be tough, especially after the entry of global players. How challenging is it to sustain in this competitive market? 

I'm personally a strong believer of the fact that the more the competition is, the better it is, in general, for the overall ecosystem. Today, some of our peers are taking short videos a little more seriously. Ultimately, we want advertisers to realize that they need to figure out a way of communicating their story in a shorter span if audiences in this country are actually consuming content that's 15 to 20 seconds long. It's going to be very tough for a brand to be able to engage with the same audience by showing them a 60-second ad. I assume the same applies for our peers who are trying to push the short- form narrative in the market. 

We are trying to make brands understand that you can actually tell your story within a shorter time frame. Consumers want the ads to be crisp and more contextual. We are bringing in the finer nuances of a particular region, language or culture to it and that's something that we do quite well. 

So, while competition is good, we have also created our own niche. We know what our strengths are. Even the creator ecosystem that we have built for Sharechat and Moj are different from what some of the other players have. Creator ecosystem can actually add a lot of value to any brand. 

How many advertisers are you currently working with? 

In the second half of last year, that is, July to December 2022, we had close to 200-plus advertisers working with us. With Moj, that number will go upwards of 350. These are not just one-off associations. Quite a few of our advertisers are actually doing repeat business with us. Advertisers like Pepsi, Coke and Amazon work very closely with us. We work with advertisers from across industry and verticals. 

The strength of the platform also lies in the fact that we don't offer just vanilla video display sort of options. Given that we are an India-based organization, we can actually do a lot more innovation around our ad units and that's why we are able to offer a whole wide range of options to advertisers. 

How has been the ad market for you over the past year in terms of revenue and what are your expectations for the current fiscal? 

There have definitely been headwinds across the board due to macro factors. Advertisers have been re-evaluating their budgets and trying to figure what is the best ROI that they can generate from their ad dollars. Good thing about platforms like ours is that we are actually able to make a material difference and we are actually able to deliver better. Hence, we continue to be present in the marketing plans of almost all the advertisers that we work with. That's exactly the reason why we have managed to grow our revenues almost 2x over a period of six months. That's a testament to how the platform is actually able to deliver for advertisers across categories. 

We have done long-term deals with quite a few advertisers that sort of gives us the confidence that we would be able to go further higher up. 

Can you name those advertisers?

I'm not at liberty to actually talk about the names.

What has been the response after Moj and Max Takatak merger?

That merger was the largest in the history of the social media space. It actually consolidated the viewer base that was going after short-form video platforms. It was a pretty positive move to be able to become the undisputed leader in the short form video space right. That's exactly what that merger delivered for us. 

Do you have any plans to expand your staff strength or maybe new acquisitions?

I would leave it to our CFO to answer the acquisition part, but I can talk about how we are looking at expansion in general from a revenue perspective. While we continue to work with the larger advertisers in this country and continue to scale business on that side, we are also very serious about expanding our footprint in terms of the number of advertisers that we want to bring on board. 

We do believe that given the wide range of options that are available on the platform and given our ability to deliver for the smallest of budgets to the largest of budgets, we don't want any advertiser to be left out of our ecosystem. 

One of the big focus areas for us this year is to essentially expand our footprint in what we call the mid-market segment. So, essentially we are going after SMBs as well as these would be the mid-tier of advertisers. 

There are top 200 advertisers that we work very closely with. Now, we are actually expanding that base to the next 2000 advertisers. This means a lot of small advertisers, proprietorships and other organizations.