The new feature allows advertisers to append their ad with the content every time a post from ShareChat or Moj is shared on WhatsApp.
“The core behaviour of users coming on ShareChat is that they look at their favourite content and in one click, they share it to their WhatsApp groups,” said Gaurav Jain, head of emerging business at ShareChat and Moj, which are among the biggest language first video platforms. “Now, for the first time, we have opened this up for monetisation.”
Jain said Branded Shares feature is currently in beta version. “We only have a select set of advertisers, but they can’t get enough of it,” he said.
Companies across gaming, FMCG, fintech, media and entertainment, devotion and the like are utilising the feature.
It essentially means that when someone shares a ShareChat video on WhatsApp, the advertiser can make sure that their ad pre-rolls before the actual video plays.
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“Branded shares are effective, measurable and so personalised,” Jain said. “We recently had a large spiritual organisation come to us saying that on the eve of Guru Purnima, which was in July, they wanted all devotional content shared from ShareChat to WhatsApp to have a ‘Happy Guru Purnima’ message with the name of the organisation and an image of its spiritual head.”What makes this unique is that since the message comes from someone known, almost 100% of WhatsApp users who receive these messages open it, while many users block messages from WhatsApp business accounts.
In cities like Hyderabad, Pune, Lucknow, Jaipur and Coimbatore, more than one-third of the population use ShareChat or Moj every month, Jain said.
Over the next three to four months, the company plans to take the ‘Branded Shares’ feature to more advertisers and users.
“We know these are not the best of times for advertising, but despite that in Q1 of 2023, our ad revenue grew by 20% year-on-year,” Jain said. “In Q2, this figure was about 35% and in Q3, we’re looking at year-on-year north of 60%.”
He said the company has also seen its expenses decrease 80% in the last 12 months while its user engagement time remained intact and revenue nearly doubled. “If things go this way, we’re very confident of turning the contribution margin positive by the end of the year,” Jain said.
Moj is one of the country’s largest short form video apps that has seen three times growth in organic downloads in the last six to eight months, he said. Retention is at its highest level ever since Moj was launched and this is despite an increase in ad loads, Jain added.