Dailyhunt- The Leading Local News Provider Platform of India!

1. Overview

In this fast-growing world, there is so much happening around us which makes it necessary to keep ourselves aware and updated about the things around us. Thankfully, with the advent of the internet, there is a multiplicity of online news portals that run on a 24×7 basis to keep us abreast of all the information. But, for a long time, there was an absence of a reliable source that could also offer local news in different regional languages which could engage people from any city or place in the country, until Dailyhunt came into being.

According to a study made by KPMG between the years 2016 – 2021, every 9 out of every 10 new internet users use their regional language to access news online. However, most of the Media &Entertainment businesses have neglected the regional & local content making it one of the most underutilized opportunities in the Indian internet spacedespite their immense scope. Therefore, the Bengaluru-based Dailyhunt entered the news segment to fill this void in the Indian news market.

Dailyhunt is the leading Indian content & news aggregator start-up that was founded by Umesh Kulkarni, Shailendra Sharma, and Chandrashekhar Sohoni in the year 2009 as “Newshunt” which was later acquired by the current co-founder & CEO Virendra Gupta in 2011 who named it “Dailyhunt”. Headquartered in Bangalore India, the start-up is known to procure, aggregate, and present news and daily local language content in 14+ regional languages from 3000+ publishers to help it to cater local content to its target audience. Since its inception, Dailyhunt has seen tremendous success & popularity by massing a user following of over 3B+ and becoming one of the most downloaded apps in India.

Apart from this, Dailyhunt is also hailed as one of the earliest “Tech-start-ups to reach unicorn valuation” on Dec 21, 2020, after its parent company VerSe Innovation successfully raised a sum above $100 million co-led by investors like Google, Microsoft, and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation.

2. Dailyhunt- About & How does it work?

According to the PwC’s Global Entertainment & Media Outlook (2022-2026) report, the Media & Entertainment industry in India is expected to reach $43 B by 2026 expanding at an 8.8% CAGR. The same report has also suggested that the industry has made substantial progress since the year 2016 when its valuation stood at $27.3B.

Dailyhunt is an Indian local news and content aggregator app that offers local content in up to 14 regional languages such as Hindi, Punjabi, Kannada, Marathi, etc. Being one of the early entrants in the regional content space, it offers local news & short videos through its digital platform which are sourced from 3000+ content providers including organizations and stringers. With the help of its robust technologies, the platform offers personalized content according to user requirements. From the biggest news sources to the hyperlocal correspondents, Dailyhunt offers news everybody surely loves to watch.

And not only this, Dailyhunt allows its users to browse the topics of their interest and share news over various social media platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, etc.

3. Dailyhunt-Mission & Vision

India is a diverse country with 22+ regional languages prevalent in different parts of the country. Interestingly India is also home to the largest internet consumer population which is above 400M and is expected to grow further in the future. However, with only 10-20% of the English literate population, others prefer to access & consume content in their local languages.

The name “Dailyhunt “was also chosen to allow its users to receive daily news while looking resolutely for any particular content. Dailyhunt aims to revolutionize the digital platforms in the country through its fundamental focus on Local languages and offer content that empowers billions of readers by helping them to consume and socialize with the content which informs, enriches, and provides entertainment to them.Co-founder Umang Bedi said explains “People love personalized digital content and not the generic content that is offered by most of the content makers”, which is what differentiates Dailyhunt over others as it uses technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)for content curation & improvement”.

Since then, Dailyhunt has established itself as “India’s biggest avenue for Local Language Content” with more than 28 million page visits every month to a user base of around 3B with 263 million active monthly users across all its platforms offering content that comes from 3000+ content creators which are personalized by a state of the art AI feed leading to the high-quality engagement on the app. Not only this, store DailyHunt has more than 5 crore app installs with a rating of 4.3 out of 5, and on Apple’s App StoreDailyHunt app has ratings of 4.5, thereby allowing advertisers either bigger or smaller reach out to the Dailyhunt to reach to unique local language audience which is not possible with any other platform in the country.

4. Dailyhunt-Founder

Dailyhunt was founded in the year 2011 by Virendra Gupta who is currently the founder & CEO of Dailyhunt. Later, Virendra roped in the other co-founders Umang Bedi & Shailendra Sharma to join Dailyhunt to make the platform available to a wider audience.

Virendra Gupta

Virendra Gupta is the Founder & CEO of Dailyhunt. He completed his Bachelor in Engineering (Electronics and Communication) from the MBM College Jodhpur, after which he pursued his Master’s in Management from IIT Mumbai School of Management. Virendra Gupta started his career as a Product Manager for BPL Mobile and as a key part of the OnMobile start-up team in Marketing and Alliances. Later, Virendra went on to work in key leadership positions in top companies like Bharti Cellular and Trilogy. Finally, in March 2007, he started Verse Innovations Pvt Ltd, a value-added service company that acquired Newshunt, and launched Dailyhunt in 2011 under its parent company Verse Innovations.

Umang Bedi

Umang Bedi is another co-founder of Dailyhunt. He also completed his Bachelor in Electronics from Pune University and went on to pursue his Master in General Management Program from the Harvard Business School. He started his career as a Senior Software Engineer in Satyam Computer Services, and later served in key management positions such as Senior Consultant at Wipro corporation, Country Solutions Engagement Manager at Sun Microsystems Inc., Banking & Finance Head at Symantec Corporation, and a Managing Director for companies like Intuit Inc., Adobe and Facebook before finally joining Verse’ Innovations in Feb 2018, where he was raised to the designation of Co-founder in 2020. Apart from this, Umang is also a Statutory Board Member of another software company Goals101 since 2018.

Shailendra Sharma

Shailendra Sharma is the SVP of Product &Engineering at Dailyhunt. Shailendra Sharma completed his studies at Pune University where he completed his Masters’s in Computer Applications. He started his career as a Software Trainee at Tata Research and Development Center and went on to work as a Member of Technical staff in Persistent Systems and several key positions in Trilogy before joining Dailyhunt as a VP of Engineering in Jan 2017. Apart from these, Sharma also founded a SaaS-based platform 360fy Technologies in April 2014.

     5.Dailyhunt- Story of Inception

In 2009, two ex-employees of Nokia namely Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni founded a Symbian app namely Newshunt. However, in 2011, Newshunt was acquired by Virendra Gupta under its venture Versé Innovation Pvt Ltd.which was a B2B businessthat offered SMS alerts on jobs, matrimony, property, news, and education to its subscribers across India, Bangladesh & Africa. In 2011, Virendra Gupta decided to enter the B2C space through the acquisition of Eterno Infotech, the parent company of Newshunt (the news aggregator), set up by Umesh Kulkarni and Chandrashekhar Sohoni. Eterno Infotech was engaged in the business of the development of mobile apps and platforms with a key focus on Indian Languages.

Later in the year 2015, Virendra Gupta revamped and relaunched the business as Dailyhunt as its founder, and the other two co-founders Umesh Bedi & Shailendra Sharma joined later.Cut to date, Dailyhunt is regarded as India’s most prominent regional language platform &dealer of e-books containing 70,000 titles in ten languages.

6. Dailyhunt- Business & Revenue Model

Besides being a local news aggregator platform, Dailyhunt is primarily a vernacular news aggregator application with a slight difference as compared to other traditional news platforms as they only target 10-15% of the internet users as the remaining percentage of the audience is targeted by Dailyhunt which offers the engaging content in 14+ regional languages attracting more audience.The platform offers three types of content to its audience–news, e-books & magazines, and short videos through the Josh app.Such content is sourced from 3000+ content providers that contain some hyperlocal news correspondents.

Dailyhunt allows its users to access and read news content on its platform. Primarily, there are three sources of revenue for Dailyhunt-

• Impressions Based (News)– Dailyhunt has tied up with some of the biggest new media &publishing houses who share their content on its platform in exchange for the advertising revenue that Dailyhunt shares with them.
• Books/Magazines/Singles-based Content-Further, Dailyhunt has entered tie-ups with books & magazine publishers who allow it to publish its content (e-books, single articles, etc.) in turn of which Dailyhunt shares revenue with the publishers who share it with the authors.Though the users could read news freely on the platform, if they wish to read or download the books or magazines in their system they need to pay the applicable charges.
•  In-App Advertisements– Dailyhunt also generates revenues from individuals or businesses who publish ads and promotional material which are featured on the app and are read by 3B users, thus helping Dailyhunt to get the most of its revenue from display advertising.

7. Dailyhunt- Funding & Investors

To date, Dailyhunt has collected over $1.23B in funding over 15 funding rounds. The latest tranche of investment came in April 2022, when Daily hunt’s parent company Verse’ Innovations was able to collect $805 million in a joint investment round co-led byits existing investor Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) who solely invested a sum of $425M, while the remaining sum was invested by some new investors like Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund, Luxor Capital and Sumeru Ventures and its existing investors like Sofina Group &Baillie Gifford among others in a Series H funding rounds. This whopping sum of funding has pushed the valuation of Dailyhunt to $5B.

Before this, Verse Innovations also successfully mopped a sum of $100 million from another joint investing round that came from Google, Microsoft, and Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubations along with other existing investors like Sofina Group and Lupa Systems in a Series H funding round that came in Dec 2020 which helped it to reach over $1 Billion valuation making it one of the earliest tech start-up to enter the unicorn start-ups club in Indiafocused on local languages.

However, Bytedance, a China-based investor reportedly exited Dailyhunt by selling its stake in the business to other existing investors namely Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in a secondary deal on June 22 at a discounted rate of 56%. With the exit of Tiktok owner Bytedance, Dailyhunt has become one of the few unicorn start-ups in the country with 0% Chinese holding.

8. Dailyhunt- Mergers & Acquisitions

• Verse’ Innovations, the parent company of Dailyhunt has acquired Buyt.In, a search engine that helps its user to discover, compare and purchase products from a variety of e-commerce portals in the year July 2015.
• In June 2019, Verse Innovations acquired a hyperlocal video content and news content application, namely LocalPlay that allows its users tostream video content in smaller towns and local businesses to place advertisements & promotional content on the platform to target consumers in their area.
• Again on Feb 23, 2021 Verse Innovations acquired a Bangalore-based AI solutions business named Cognirel Technologies Pvt. Ltd. to enhance the technical efficiencies of the Dailyhunt platform.
• Finally, on March 10, 2021 VerSe Innovation also acquired a community-focused application Vebbler that allowed its users to share photos & videos.

9. Dailyhunt- Key Marketing Strategies

Dailyhunt enjoyed a massive user following and popularity among its consumers due to one or more reasons that have been highlighted below-

• Being one of the early entrants in the ‘regional content market’ helped it to take the lead in the vernacular language industry.
• With strong technology at play, Dailyhunt adopted smart technology including artificial intelligence, deep learning, and machine learning to offer curated and personalized content on a real-time basis to attract more audiences.
• Like any other news platforms like Google News and Flipboard, which were previously offered as the default news platforms on a slew of mobile devices, Dailyhunt has also partnered with some leading mobile manufacturers intending to increase its user base to expand its user base further.
• Multiple Advertising Campaigns-Dailyhunt launched several advertising campaigns that were published in TV commercials and on social media platforms which included-

#Aur Kya Chal Raha Hai– This campaign was released in October 2015 that essentially communicated the rebranding exercise making Newshunt the “Dailyhunt”.

#News Ka Daily Dose-This campaign was released on social media in September 2017, which demonstrated the reaction of Indians towards news. It targeted the youth population offering them a better understanding of content offered on the Dailyhunt platform.

#HarBhashaEqual– Dailyhunt released another campaign in August 2018 which highlighted the in-built bias against our vernacular languages and aimed at promoting language equality in India.

#KhudKiSochBanao- Next in 2019, Dailyhunt launched other campaigns to raise awareness about the upcoming General Elections and urged people to have their opinions and not just to be parrots to repeat everything they hear.

#DailyhuntHaiNa-In the same year, Dailyhunt announced its latest multimedia campaign primarily targeting the millennials to know about the unique benefits of the Dailyhunt platform and attract them.

10. DailyHunt- Achievements

Virendra Gupta and Umang Bedi received the “Exchange4media Influencer of the Year Award” in November 2018.

11. Dailyhunt- Growth & Challenges

By 2018, Dailyhunt was able to successfully add around 12 million net new monthly active users, which quickly ramped up with the addition of 15 million new monthly active users in August. In September, the total monthly active users (MAU) on all the platforms (Dailyhunt and One India) put altogether were more than 138 million, out of which Dailyhunt reportedly accounted for 100 Million+ solely.

One major challenge that Dailyhunt had to face early on was the interpretation of font for each regional language on the mobile devices, which was resolved by the team itself through supervised and unsupervised data learning technology that helped it to gain more sustainable success and product differentiation. Since each language has its nuisance in terms of its correlation of multiple words with other languages, thus by working on data science and machine learning, sentences are broken into words and are correlated.

During this period, Verse’ Innovation has turned out to become one of the ‘Leading news Platforms” registering an 8 times higher growth than its closest rival InShorts.  Dailyhunt has grown tremendously to serve more than 350M users each month with an average user time of 30 minutes spent per user per day. Its short video platform Josh has reportedly grown to 139 monthly active users (MAUs) and 68 daily active users (DAUs) as of January 20, 2022, making it one of the most popular platforms with over 100M downloads from the Google Play store. According to Umang Bedi, “This much growth has been possible due to the availability of 543+ TV channels within the app, which is higher than anyone else”.

Launch & Growth of Josh- A Short Videos Platform

In September 2020, after the ban of the Chinese app Tiktok by the Indian Government, Dailyhunt stepped in to fill the void created by the app. Josh brought on board 200 leading TikTokers with a combined follower base of more than 300 Million across social media channels. Interestingly, within 3 months, Josh became the market leader in the short video segment with 50 Mn downloads and 23 Mn daily visitors, each spending an average of 21 minutes on the app. Umang Bedi states “We hope to double our current MAU from 50M to 100M by the end of 2020, however, it is still lagging by 25M to touch the mark. However, both App Annie and Sensor Tower happened to witness a sharp fall in Josh’s ranking in the past month.

12. DailyHunt –Financials

Revenue Breakdown

Verse’ Innovation posted total revenue of INR 771.8 Cr in FY21, which was a 149% jump in revenue as compared to Rs. 309.7 Cr in FY20. The total revenues from operations were Rs. 666.1 Cr which was a considerable jump from Rs. 267.6 Cr in FY20 and Rs. 159.1Cr in FY19.

Similarly, income from other sources reached Rs. 105.6 Cr in FY21 which is also remarkable as compared to Rs. 42 Crores in FY20 and Rs. 6.4 Cr in FY19.The other income included Rs 99.2 Cr for interest on income tax refund& Rs.6.3 Cr for miscellaneous non-operating revenues.

Expenses Breakdown

Nevertheless, despite a noteworthy rise in the revenues, the losses also rose to Rs. 1,579.7 Cr in FY21, a 2 times increase than the expenses incurred in FY20 which were Rs. 720Cr.The primary reasons for such could be an upsurge in employee welfare and business advertisement expenses.

Under its employee benefit expenses includes salaries of its employees & Directors, gratuity, etc. Among other employee welfare benefits, Verse’ spent Rs. 191.5 Cr in FY21which is a marginal jump from Rs.155.2 Cr it clocked in FY20.

Further, Verse’ innovations also spent more on advertisements and miscellaneous spending in FY21. For instance, the spending on advertisement increased significantly reaching from Rs.591.3 Crore and Rs. 696.9 Crores in FY21 leading to a more than 2X times increase in the overall losses in FY21 as compared to FY20.Thus, Dailyhunt had to spend Rs 2.7 to earn a single rupee, which is a slight improvement from Rs 3 spent to earn Rs.1 that the company reported last year. These losses are expected to continue for a while as Dailyhunt had to incur additional expenditure with promotion and seamless integration of Josh, which is facing stiff competition from its market competitors like Share Chat’s Moj, InMobi-owned Glance’s Roposo, and MX’s Takatak.

     13.Dailyhunt –Partnerships & Competitors

Since its inception, Dailyhunt has entered several associations & partnerships in the industry, some of which have been highlighted below-

• Dailyhunt entered a partnership with Discovery Communications India in March 2019 for a multi-year alliance for publishing & displaying short-term content in March 2019.
• Next, Dailyhunt formed a partnership with e-commerce start-up Snapdeal to offer news-related content in May 2020.
• Dailyhunt signed as an Associate Sponsor in association with Star Sports for Dream 11 IPL 2020 in September 2020.
• In December 2020, Dailyhunt announced its partnership with the Mzaalo app, an entertainment platform that allows the users to get access to the Mzaalo content and get rewards for the same. Later, these points could be redeemed to make purchases from the Mzaalo app.

Competitors

Despite Dailyhunt being one of the earliest and most popular entrants in its regional & local genre, it faces tough competition in the market. There are a series of applications that are chasing to gain the first position in the market with their unique USPs.Inshorts is a news platform that offers news headlines in 60 words, and is currently a strong competitor to Dailyhunt in the news aggregation space including others namely-

• Newsstand
• Business Insider
• FirstPost
• NDTV
• Dainik Bhaskar

Josh, the short video application of Dailyhunt faces competition with

• Moj by Share Chat;
• MX TakaTak; and
• YouTube Shorts

14. Dailyhunt-Future Plans

Presently, Dailyhunt is striving harder to rule out its competitors including the rivals for Josh, a short video platform app. Dailyhunt has plans to expand its presence to 600 districts out of 725 districts across the Indian subcontinent as compared to the 400 districts where the platform enjoys popularity and a strong presence. Dailyhunt also aims to raise user engagement on the platform could triple its user base& double the user time spent on the platform and release 5X more content which could be monetized through video advertising.

Also,multiple reports have suggested that vernacular language tech platform Dailyhunt’s parent company is also planning its debut on the Indian public stock exchange by bringing its first issue with the market becoming more & more favorable to tech stocks in the past few years.

Now, when advertisers are looking for platforms that are much more than global platforms to increase their reach to vernacular users, Dailyhunt is planning to create & build a localized newsfeed with an interest-driven network for ad-making use of the local knowhow that it built and embedded in its product for a decade which will likely challenge the social media giant Facebook.The company’s next move is to triple the user base, double the time spent on the app, and release five times more content to be In the words of Virendra Gupta, CEO &Co-founder “For the coming next 10 years, Dailyhunt is going to be all about the country that does not speak English to take to consumption in a big way with smartphones”.