At Inshorts, we are currently working with almost 500+ advertisers: Azhar Iqubal

Inshorts is India’s highest-rated and No. 1 English news app, with more than 10 million users on its platform. The app curates the most significant news items of the day, across categories like national, world, politics, business, sports, technology and entertainment, in just 60 words with a link to read the stories that interest them, in detail. Inshorts also continues to be India’s highest-rated news app on Android since January 2014 with a rating of 4.6, and has more than 3 billion-page views per month.

Also read:  How Inshorts is wooing news readers & advertisers with its 60-word format

Last year they also launched Public App, which is the fastest growing Indian social app with 50 million+ users and one million videos being created every month. The app allows people to record and share happenings around them enabling real-time local updates. It is currently available in 6 Indian languages – viz. Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil and Telugu. The Public App aims to have 100 million+ users by year-end and will be available in all Indian languages.

With the pandemic and the resulting isolation, people across India used the App to stay connected to their community and view and share all important and verified updates in real time like how to use essential services like groceries stores, hospitals, their timings, quarantine arrangements in their surroundings.

In conversation with Adgully, Azhar Iqubal, Founder and CEO, Public and Inshorts, speaks about growth of the apps ecosystem in India, the journey of Inshorts and Public, providing a brand-safe environment, marketing strategy and more.

The exit of Chinese apps has given a great opportunity for app brands from India. How has Public App leveraged the current situation and what is the differentiation that you have introduced to garner market share and attract new users?

Public App is a video-led social app launched in April 2019 to help people connect to their community and local authorities through real-time updates. Much before Chinese apps were banned, the platform has been on an exponential growth trajectory since then – within six months of launch, it became one of the fastest-growing Indian social app and ranked #1 on Play Store for local updates.

With the pandemic and the resulting isolation, people across India used the App to stay connected to their community and view and share all important and verified updates in real time like how to use essential services like groceries stores, hospitals, their timings, quarantine arrangements in their surroundings. This was the phase when our user-base doubled from 15 million to 30 million in just 1 month and time spent jumped by 50%.

The app logged 50 million+ users in June 2020 and more than one million videos are created on it every month. Public App, unlike an entertainment platform, provides users with informative content through short videos. We attribute this success solely to our team for recognising the gaps that existed in the social media space and offering a product that addresses it perfectly. Our past or future success has little to do with the ban of other apps as we are on track to reach the numbers irrespective.

Currently you have Inshorts and Public App in the market. What has been your strategy to keep them distinctly separate as both of them are in the news genre? How do you keep your momentum running to deliver fresh content?

Both Inshorts and Public App are solving different problems of the users. While Inshorts is India’s No. 1 English news aggregator app and helps the user to stay connected to the world in short time, Public App is the largest location-based social platform, wherein people stay connected to their locality through verified and authoritative updates.

For Inshorts, content is curated from top national and international sources, whereas it is completely different for Public. The users are in power and they use it to share their voice in their community like report happenings in their locality and raise their problems with the local authorities. In that sense, the Public app works on the principle of responsible citizen journalism. The app is also used by political leaders and local authorities to share verified updates and be in regular touch with citizens of their regions.

Can you elaborate the target audience for both these apps? Are you promoting your two apps to two different audiences and is there any duplication?

Inshorts App caters to the mobile generation who wants to stay informed with the current affairs through short form content. Due to the inherent nature of the platform, it is majorly targeted at people who are short on time and want to be updated. Hence, the app majorly gets traction from metro, Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. The Public app meets the intrinsic need of people to stay connected to their community. Public app is a social network that gives you video updates about what is happening around you in your locality and in your own local language (vernacular content). Hence, it essentially includes everyone as a part of its target audience.

What kind of brands are leveraging your platform? With everyone is talking about performance marketing today, how are you ensuring that brands are getting the right value and ROI?

Inshorts is known for unique and non-intrusive formats of advertising. The campaigns on Inshorts are designed to help the brands connect with their audience through unique ad formats native to the platform like 60-word branded content, vertical videos, motion stories and digital magazines. Currently, we are working with almost 500+ advertisers. Our client list includes global brands like Vodafone, Oneplus, Netflix, Mercedes, and Myntra, among many others.

We have recently started monetisation on the Public app. Our major focus stays the same – to deliver innovative and non-intrusive ad formats to users and the best in class UI experience – much like what we have done at Inshorts. For advertisers, we are committed to providing a brand-safe environment, quality content and reliable brand affinity uplift metrics. We are welcoming like-minded brands who want to connect with influencers to reach out to consumers and working on getting them onboard. We are also working with a wide variety of news publications who share their content on the platform in order to expand their audience. Some of the names like BBC, Zee News, Dainik Bhaskar, News Nation and more.

I believe you plan to double your downloads for Public App. How do you plan to do this and what is going to be your marketing and media strategy to woo the audience to download your app? Are you not looking at iPhone users?

We are on track to achieve our targets. Public App is now available across India and in all regional languages as compared to 16 states and 8 Indian languages in June 2020. Till now, we have reached the numbers through word of mouth. Our unique content offerings have helped us gain popularity among users and they referred us to their peers.

We are dedicated to bringing value to our users and to provide credible information on the platform. To do this, we connect them with local authorities, leaders, government officials who share information directly. This has proven to be instrumental in popularizing the app amongst users in all corners of the nation.