Ad revenue from Indian short-form video space tripled in six months: RedSeer report

According to a latest report released by homegrown consulting firm RedSeer Consulting, short-form content has grown 1.37x in terms of monthly active user (MAU) and 1.1x in terms of daily active users from June 2020, when Chinese video app TikTok was banned in India.

Domestic apps have significantly grown in the past year and short-form video continues its growth journey as it shows a continuous increase in engagement outside the top 50 cities and currently accounts for 9% of time spent on overall content consumption, according to the report.

The report says while global social media dominates in the Top 50 cities, Indian social media platforms and short video platforms garner a major chunk of share in the ROI.

Further, while the growth of overall time spent on social media has been organic at ~8%, non-social media (short video) time has grown at 57%, indicating a shift from social media consumption to short-form video.

While traffic has increased, content creation velocity has grown 4.4x in the last two quarters due to:

- Improvement in filter tools leading to users becoming creators at a higher pace.

- Access to studio and high-quality content creation facilities for large influencers.

- Growing "mainstreaming" of the space for advertisers, leading to higher monetisation for creators

Both Josh and Moj have seen a good jump in user and creator NPS largely driven by:

1. With users seeing more personalisation, fresher and more filtered content.

2. Creators having access to new tools increased reach and more collaboration opportunities.

“While short-form video ad monetisation is still at a nascent stage, and accounts for less than 1% of the digital ad spend, ad revenue in the sector has grown more than ~3X in the last six months and as the user base continues to rise, ad revenue will continue to grow. Live stream gifting and live e-commerce are also showing early signs of growth and will form an important monetisation opportunity for short-form players,” said Ujjwal Chaudhry, associate partner at RedSeer.