How Vigo Video has grown its monthly active user base to 20 million

Amid the burgeoning video platforms in the country, short-video platform Vigo Video has sought to create differentiation for itself with the launch of India’s first ever vertical web series, titled ‘Pyar Tera Superstar’. Based on the millennial love relationship of Divyanka Sirohi, a Vigo Creator, the web series revolves around her digital romance, which eventually blossomed into a real-life love story. 

Connecting real people with real stories from their community, Vigo Video has been bringing Indians together through entertaining and heartfelt visual stories, brought to life through professional editing tools, creative stickers, filters and special effects. 

Adgully spoke to Vigo Video’s Ashray Sachdeva, Global Marketing Strategy, ByteDance to know more about the short-video platform growth story, switching to a vertical format, content strategy and more. 

Take us through the journey of Vigo Video. How long have you been in the market?
Vigo Video has been in the market for the last two years. We are celebrating our second anniversary in September. The journey has been amazing. We have focused on growing exponentially. India has a huge potential as a market with about 300 million influencers and growing. Vigo as a platform saw this as an opportunity and said India is where we should be. 

What has propelled the growth of Vigo Video?
One of the key reasons is due to data being cheap and the growing usage of smartphones. The fact in India is that if you give users, especially from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, a platform like this where they can consume content on the go without consuming too much data, it really helps. That’s why people are spreading and sharing it and also downloading. It really helps. 

What has been your marketing strategy?
In the last few months, we’ve tried to create a difference in the market by looking at the vertical format and create content on the platform itself. ‘Pyar Tera Superstar’ is India’s first web series in this format. There has been no urgency to change the horizontal format to a vertical one. This web series has 7 episodes of 1 minute duration each. We have partnered with SonyLIV and will release the longer format which will be vertical. What is interesting is that even SonyLIV has adapted to the vertical format for this series which no other OTT platform has done before. Vigo Video, leaders in the short-video content market, has become the pioneers to take this forward in the OTT space. 

What kind of content really works for this platform?
What we’ve seen in India is that a lot of lip-sync, drama and comedy content is being created on our platform. Coming back to the proposition of real people with real stories, people from the Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets want to tell their stories to the audiences and that makes it really different from the other platforms. 

Where are the majority of your users from?
Majority of our users are from Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets and that’s where a big percentage of the market is. 

What is your revenue model?
There is no revenue model. Our focus is on the growth strategy. We are only focusing on making sure that we have a user base that is strong and then obviously brands that know they want to be in the Tier 2 and Tier 3 markets, then focus on the revenue. We function on investments and we already have 20 million monthly active users.