 "Publishers, e-commerce sites see money as more vernacular users come online")
“A little over five years ago, it was a little difficult to monetise local language traffic, but not anymore,” said B.G Mahesh, founder and MD of OneIndia. On the internet, consumption is about 40 per cent in local languages. There should have been more monetisation, but we are already seeing improvements, especially after Google Adsense started supporting Hindi,”
India had 353 million internet users as of June 2015, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India. Out of these, 127 million were local language internet users, which grew by 47 per cent year-on-year, thanks to growing smartphone penetration in Tier-II, Tier-III and rural regions.
The digital advertising market in India is expected to grow to Rs 6,250 crore in 2015, growing at 44 per cent, according to Ficci-KPMG Media and Entertainment report published in February this year. “Mobile internet is still an urban phenomena,” said Virendra Gupta, co-founder and CEO of DailyHunt (formerly NewsHunt), a local language mobile news aggregator. DailyHunt sees over 95 per cent of its overall traffic for regional language content.
Gupta said there are multiple ways to monetise regional language users. DailyHunt, apart from aggregating news in several languages, also serves up e-books from regional publishers. The company also recently acquired commerce recommendation engine Buyt to experiment with contextual content commerce.
“Don’t people, who don’t speak English, have the need to buy accessories? What you offer them could be different, or the way you offer them something could be different,” added Gupta. “Currently commerce is driven by offers, but in the future we can potentially suggest commerce items based on what a user is reading.”
India is expected to have 500 million internet users by 2018, 400 million of whom will access on mobile devices. Growing smartphone and data penetration is helping more regional language users gain access to the internet. Reliance Jio plans to roll out high-speed 4G internet connectivity across the country by the end of the year, further boosting this growth.
"The rate of acquisition of local language users is faster than English-speaking users. Developers are now realizing this and scrambling to build full-stack solutions for supporting regional languages on apps," said Arvind Pani, CEO and co-founder of Reverie, a language tech startup.
Swalekh, the company's regional language keyboard for smart devices, offers users several modes for typing in local languages. However, it's still a work in progress since there's no standard layout for a Hindi keyboard as opposed to the QWERTY standard for typing in English.
If app developers are building local language support, will e-commerce companies be behind. Myntra, the fashion app plans to look at this opportunity as it explores to get more customers from the hinterland. The firm is working on a strategy to provide local language support to the beyond the first 250 million customers, said Prasad Kompalli, head of e-commerce platform at Myntra said in a recent interview.
The same with Numbermall, an app-based platform with an offline presence in ecommerce and digital transactions. "All our app will multilingual with the option for users to choose individual languages such as Telugu and Bengali soon," said Kiran Gali, founder and CEO of Numbermall. "As we are looking at interior parts of the country, our key is to reach out to users in their local languages."
An IAMAI and IMRB International report in August said the current Internet user base in India is set to grow at 39%, aided by increase in local language content. Rural India will be the primary driver of this growth at 75% while urban areas will see a growth of only 16%. Despite digitisation, about 95% of content in conventional media are still consumed in local languages in India. Internet-based platforms or app are no different.