RVCJ's journey from meme platform to ever-evolving content company

In the times when CID jokes and Rajnikant’s ‘Robot’ memes were the pop-entertainment SMS for the masses, Rajnikant Vs CID Jokes aka RVCJ was founded by Shahid Javed Ansari as a fun page for sharing jokes on Facebook in 2010.  

Completely unaware of what a ‘meme’ was, when he was first introduced to the meme format by Ankit Mor who then joined the RVCJ team as partner, the founder readily agreed and India witnessed the birth of meme content, which apparently was being organically promoted on the digital platform.

That being said, the growth of the meme page was truly unexpected as it achieved an astounding following of 8-10 million within just first 4-5 years of its existence on Facebook!

Branded posts through avenues like affiliate marketing followed soon after, thanks to Harpreet Singh's introduction. He later played an important role in the company's decision to launch its website, becoming a partner in the process. Ironically, the website's launch attracted such an enormous influx of traffic that it crashed momentarily

Remarkably, within the first month, the three partners managed to generate an impressive revenue of Rs 20-30 lakh solely from the website, utilizing ads and Instant Articles on Facebook.

Aziz Khan, a media expert, reunited with his school-time friend Ansari, and after extensive discussions spanning three years, joined as a partner to explore the platform's potential. Eventually, he became the Co-founder and CRO, contributing significantly to the company's growth and success.

Later on, Pooja Sachdeva, a content writer also joined RVCJ company and went on to become a co-founder and as a result helped the content company in strategy and business growth.

In his interaction with BuzzInContent.com, Khan shared his first tryst with destiny wherein he pitched to a FMCG brand who ended up giving them a business of Rs 10 lakh in one go for an entire campaign consisting of some 5-10 posts pertaining to their collaboration with a movie starring Akshay Kumar.

Soon did they once started as a meme company for Rajnikanth and CID jokes came to be known as RVCJ Regional Media. Within a year of the rebranding, the website's revenue soared to Rs 25-30 lakh per month. However, the digression also began coming into play as Facebook’s algorithm had changed and the team was expanding.

That’s when the company actually decided to build on Instagram and since then the team has stuck to one root mantra- no matter what happens, RVCJ will grow organically and let the audience make the choice of following us based on the content.

Currently, RVCJ has amassed over 45 million+ followers across all social media platforms combined.         

“The key to our success is that we first decided to make our content engaging and relatable and that’s why when everyone was behind memes, we changed our strategy during covid- because just being a meme page wouldn’t work, and therefore we became more like an infotainment channel and started providing news as well,” Khan told BuzzInContent.com.

He also emphasised that it was owing to this move that RVCJ began gaining followers from the age group of 25-35 years as well. Cut to today, the company’s 30% loyal audience belongs to this age group.

The company also launched its own YouTube Channel and started creating similar content as TVF and Filtercopy. But the diversification tale doesn’t end at the digital platforms.

“In 2020 itself, we also got into influencer marketing and having done that, we got very big business from influencer marketing and set up a sub-division for influencer marketing. Two years back, we also launched our talent vertical called RVCJ Plex which currently manages 30-40 content creators and aids them in terms of content growth and monetization amongst other things,” highlighted Khan.

Commenting on the RVCJ’s positioning, he stated that while the meme-turned-content company is nothing less than a massy brand, its offerings such as Marketing Minds are up and running on the lines of niche brand or content.

As part of the diversification process, the content platform also launched various regional verticals such as RVCJ Bhojpuri, RVCJ Telugu, RVCJ Gujarati, RVCJ Bengali, RVCJ Marathi, etc. in addition to movies where the company has not only collaborated with the A-listers but also promotion.

“Our main source of revenue is diversified- meme contributes somewhere around 30% to our top line, approximately 30-40% comes from influencer marketing and the remaining 20-30% comes from branded content in the current day and age,” he elaborated.

Having created branded content properties such as Wrong Number and Khatta Meetha amongst others, the main challenge faced by the content company, as per Khan, is that clients often look at RVCJ as a massy brand with most of the audience residing in Tier II and III cities, which is not the case.

Commenting on the long-term goals of the company, Khan stated that the content company aims to get into the IP business and create on-ground IPs. In fact, RVCJ has been tasked with the coming up of India's first biggest IP on ground which is a two-day event in Mumbai at Nesco ground on December 16 and 17.

“In terms of content, we are also going to launch India's first content production company where we're going to provide the content solution to all the brands who have a social media presence, but they don't know how to create content but want to create quality content at far better prices,” he added.

Commenting on the prevalent trends in the branded content space, he stated that AI for sure is definitely going to work out for brands in terms of content creation and having seen the potential, a lot of brands have obviously begun leveraging AI these days. Also, Twitter, in his view, is going to be the next big thing given Elon Musk’s plan to make it an everything app.

“Memes are undoubtedly set to experience significant growth as this industry remains relatively unorganized at present. However, we don’t want to build on a meme marketing plan as a mere option for allocating budgets for the sake of it but actually want it to become a part of the mainline plan as well as retainers,” he said.

He then went on to point out that last year, RVCJ worked on over 2,000+ campaigns and introduced memes to more than 500 plus clients because as compared to influencer marketing, memes are far better ROI drivers and are now being looked at as a performance metric as well.