Now, Alibaba will pay you for publishing content on its We-Media platform

Alibaba's UCWeb to compete with Google and FB in India; opts for recommendations-based strategy

Vying to be an alternative to Google and Facebook, Alibaba Group's mobile business unit UCWeb is banking on its content recommendation strategy in the country and will be offering monetary benefits to users who contribute self-generated content on the platform, reported The Economic Times on Monday. 

In January, Tech in Asia had reported that UCWeb had announced a $30-million investment to develop a content business around the UC Browser in India and Indonesia. And, its ambitions don't appear to be misplaced. Citing StatCounter, a web traffic analysis tool, Bloomberg Quint reported that the browser now has a 57 per cent market share in India, leaving behind other mobile browsers like Chrome, Opera and Safari.

Here's what we know about Alibaba's new strategy in India:

1) Get paid for your own content: UCWeb launched UC News in India last year, which aggregated content from traditional media and integrated it with the UC Browser, reported Tech in Asia. However, the report added that this initial approach spun off into a self-publishing program called We-Media. We-Media will have user-generated content, including articles, images and video, for which the publishers can get paid. According to the ET report, the digital content program provides a bonus of Rs 300 to self-publishers for their content. 

Earlier, in January this year, UC News announced a detailed monetary compensation plan for content creation. The company has plans to add more than 30,000 self-publishers, bloggers and key opinion leaders on its user-generated content platform in 2017. (Read more) 

2) Recommendations, not search: UCWeb will be following a recommendations-based model in the Indian market. Alibaba is betting that such a model will do better than a search-based strategy. Further, it has seen its recommendations model yield rewards in its home market, in China. 

"In the future (content recommendation) will be better than search. That is our essence, we will definitely focus on it. It will lead our way to go down to operation system level in diverse," Jack Huang, president of overseas business, Alibaba Mobile Business Group told PTI recently. He added that the company would target at content consumption through UC News, where Google and Facebook "to some extent are not fiercely targeting at". (Read more)

3) Localisation is key: It might sound odd that a Chinese platform will recommend content for Indian users; however, UCWeb appears to have things well in hand. Bloomberg recently reported that UCWeb would be offering content in Hindi and English, along with tying up with known personalities from the Indian media and popular culture world. 

According to the report, author and Twitter celebrity Chetan Bhagat and actor Anushka Sharma have already been roped in for the We-Media program. Further, Indian entertainment channels and move-makers will also be tapped for providing exclusive content for the platform.