News apps: DailyHunt and Inshorts blaze a trail

 (left to right)  Screenshots of Nyusu, DailyHunt, and Inshorts

 

New Delhi: On 23 February, R. Sridharan, former managing editor at ET Now announced via a Facebook post the soft-launch of ‘Nyusu,’ a multilingual video news mobile app, along with H R Ranganath, founder of Kannada news channel, Public TV.

As smartphones become ubiquitous, and telecom operators begin rolling out 4G services, increasing numbers of people are set to turn to their mobiles to get their daily dose of news.

Enter independent news aggregation apps. While established newspapers, television channels and portals have had their own apps for some time now, several start-ups are coming into the fray, with a handful securing initial venture capital funding and some others scouting for it.

A cursory look at the Android and Apple app stores shows that there are between 40-50 independent Indian news aggregation apps both in the English and non-English segments. Although most of these appear to be plain vanilla news aggregators that have each been downloaded a few thousand times, at least two - Dailyhunt and Inshorts - appear to have gained some relative traction, and funding.

Owned by Verse Innovation, Dailyhunt (formerly Newshunt), has been downloaded more than 10 million times on the Android platform. Inshorts (earlier News In Short), which was launched in 2013 by three dropouts from IIT Delhi and IIT Kharagpur, and has been part-funded by Flipkart promoters Sachin and Binny Bansal among others, has seen more than a million downloads so far.

Although independently verified data on market shares is not readily available, an October 2015 report by YourStory said that Newshunt and News inshorts were second and fourth among the most popular Indian news apps, while NDTV remained the most popular app.

Deepit Purkayastha, one of the co-founders of Inshorts, which publishes stories in 60 word bites, told The Hoot that so far, the company has received $24 million in funding. “People in our peer group were not reading news, because they did not want to spend a lot of time on it,” he says. “The behaviour of people reading a newspaper is such that they browse through the headlines, if they are interested, they read the first paragraph and then if interested they read the rest of the article. There was no product that was designed to facilitate the need of reading news and getting updated within in 5-10 minutes,” he said, while talking about the need for such an app.

Attention spans, especially among teenagers and those in their 20s have reduced, and it is this demographic that apps like Inshorts and Nyusu are targeting. In fact, a 2015 study by Microsoft Corp had found that an increasingly digitized lifestyle has meant that people typically lose concentration after just 8 seconds.

Executives at Verse did not respond to repeated requests for comment but an October report in the Business Standard said that Dailyhunt had raised $40.5 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital and Matrix Partners. 

While most news apps offer a mix of text and video, Sridharan and Ranganath’s self-funded Nyusu is a video only format. “We buy footage from wire agencies and then we give our own analysis on top of the news,” Sridharan, whose new outfit has 40 employees working out of Bangalore and Noida, told The Hoot over the phone. “We are not an aggregator. We are custom creating creating content for smartphones in vernacular languages. There is no one else who is doing it,” he said explaining Nyusu’s strategy around developing one-minute videos in languages including Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam, besides English. “The beauty of doing video is that I don't need my consumer to be literate. As long as you have an eye to see and an ear to hear, you are my consumer,” he said while rationalizing his decision to go only with video and not text.

But how do these apps plan to monetise? While Dailyhunt and most others seem to follow the typical in-app advertising and sales model, Inshorts’ Purkayastha told The Hoot that it has entered into content “partnerships” with more than 30 news outlets whose content they summarise and publish. Although Purkayastha did not go into which platforms Inshorts partners with, or any other details of such deals, a cursory look at the app shows that it sources content from The Indian Express, The Hindustan Times, Trak.in, India Today, ScoopWhoop, the Press Trust of India, Outlook, Al Jazeera, Mint, Wired, Youtube, The Guardian and Firstpost, among others.  

He said that his app acts as an effective delivery mechanism for small news sources, whose reach is limited. Purkayastha declined to share details on this, or on the financial arrangement with the established news sources.  

Sridharan says that he is looking at a three-pronged strategy. Apart from pushing advertisements before videos (in much the same way as Youtube does) and syndication, the app will depend on sponsored infotainment videos to bring in the money. “There is a big directional change that the advertising industry is witnessing. Infotainment content is becoming powerful in engaging the consumer on social media,” he says while explaining Nyusu’s proposed revenue generation model. “The challenge for a lot of these companies is, that while they are still reaching out to the English speaking audience, there is a massive vernacular market to, which they are unable to reach properly,” he said.

Interestingly, competition among Indian news apps is hotting up just as Facebook, and Google News both want to protect their turf in the news aggregation space. Soon after Facebook announced that it was opening up its ‘instant’ feature which allows news articles to load fast, Google told publishers that it’s ‘Accelerated Mobile Pages’ project, an open source standard that aims to help publishers create mobile content that loads faster, had gone live.

In India, Google has tied up with several media companies including Network18, NDTV, India Today, Hindustan Times and DNA, a report in The Indian Express said. Facebook declined to comment and Google did not revert on a request for comment till publication. 

Aman Malik is an independent journalist