India may witness 650 mn short-form video app users by 2025

After Facebook and Google, the short-form video apps are set to take over as the second biggest segment in India in terms of time spent, even overtaking OTT platforms, a new report showed on Thursday. The monthly active users of the short-form segment are expected to grow more than two times to reach 650 million users by 2025, clocking the second spot after television.

This significant growth is largely expected to be driven by the new 300 million Internet users that will be added by 2025.

The digital ad market is expected to grow to 10 times in the next 10 years in the country and Indian short-form platforms can potentially take up to 20 per cent of the digital ad market share, according to the report by Bengaluru-based market research firm RedSeer Consulting.

"We are reaching an inflexion point for digital ads journey in India. The market is set to grow exponentially over the next decade and some of the new age content platforms are best positioned to capture this growth," said Ujjwal Chadhury, associate partner at RedSeer.

An earlier RedSeer report mentioned that the Indian short-video platforms like Moj, Josh, MX TakaTak and Roposo, among others. have managed to bring back 97 per cent of TikTok's user base owing to their aggressive marketing and user acquisition.

"Short-form creators have grown two times (since TikTok days in June 2020 when it was banned) and now stand at 40-45 million, mostly from smaller towns and cities," the findings showed.

The Indian shortf-orm apps have surged ahead in terms of creator experience.

"The Short-form content has been the biggest winner at an aggregate level, and is likely to overtake OTT video content in the coming year", as per the report.

Most of these platforms have ensured stringent content compliance standards (over 95 per cent) and monetisation opportunities.

After the TikTok ban in June 2020, Indian shortform apps have come a long way.

However, India is still at a nascent stage in terms of monetisation on short-form apps but is showing early adoption, the report mentioned.