From MX TakaTak to Roposo, TikTok's Indian clones play a tough catch-up

Local contenders have cashed in on the Chinese short video app's exit but acquiring the scale to sustain themselves will be a huge challenge going forward

Less than a year after the government banned Chinese-owned TikTok, and the short video app announced that it would exit the India market, many local contenders have tried to replicate it but a clear winner is yet to emerge.

Success, in the long run, depends on a host of factors, but what is clear so far is that the winner will most likely be someone who has built its product on a pre-existing user behaviour repository.

Immediately after the government announced a ban on Chinese ByteDance-owned TikTok in June last year, new players such as Chingari and Mitron appeared. Less than eight months later, they aren’t in the fray. The most-used apps for short video content in India are Josh, Roposo, MX TakaTak, and Moj.

All four are built by companies that have an existing user data-rich product, which gives them a good and necessary understanding of their target audience. Josh was founded in July 2020 by local language news app company Dailyhunt. Roposo, which has been around since 2014, is owned by mobile advertising and marketing firm inMobi, MX TakaTak, founded in July last year is owned by MX Player, whose parent company is Times Internet, and Moj, founded in June 2020, was built by local language social network Sharechat.

TikTok had a monthly active user (MAU) base of 170 million in India when it was banned, 75 million daily active users (DAU) and a 70 per cent retention rate, according to research firm RedSeer Consulting. The Indian variants have still to match that (see table), though some of them are not far behind.

TikTok managed to onboard over 400 million users in India from the time it was launched in 2017, helped by its regional focus and artificial intelligence algorithms that served personalised content to users that kept them hooked. At the heart of what TikTok did was figuring out an algorithm that served users content that not only kept them engaged but also kept them coming back for more.

“A good amount of the TikTok user base — about 40-50 per cent — has been captured since June. However, the retention is still yet to reach TikTok levels,” said Nikhil Dalal, senior consultant at RedSeer.

One reason, Dalal added, is because the users are still confused about which app to use. Most of them have a look and feel similar to TikTok with a few differences here and there, but players like Josh, MX TakaTak, Roposo and Moj are creating differentiation through their content library and quality.

Given ByteDance’s deep pockets — the Chinese firm was valued at a whopping $140 billion last year, according to CB Insights — it spent money where it mattered.

TikTok’s personalisation engine is the envy of not just younger players, but also technology giants Facebook and Google. Shortly after India banned TikTok, Facebook launched Reels, 15-second multi-clip videos with audio, effects and new creative tools. YouTube launched Shorts, which allows vertical videos up to 60 seconds in length.

Instagram and YouTube, however, cater to a different kind of user — the more urban, affluent, or aspirational user. Their short video products, though, have taken the format to a more diverse set of users globally and in India. The space left by TikTok is going to be filled by what the technology world likes to call “Bharat” — the local language, local context-rich user, mostly coming from smaller towns.

Capitalising on that understanding, Josh moved fast after the TikTok ban was announced. “As soon as TikTok was banned, it was able to get over 200 top TikTok influencers within the first few days. Their tech engine for personalisation coupled with high quality influencers helped them in pushing high quality content to users,” said Dalal.

MX TakaTak created an event called “Fame House”, where it put 15 leading Indian influencers under one roof in Goa, which was a hit with the influencer community. Moj partnered with Indian movies and shows like Bigg Boss to drive engagement on the platform.

Influencers are essentially people on a platform with a huge following (and thus, reach), who can earn money through branded content deals or advertising products through the content they create. According to a list of top 15 TikTok influencers of 2020, compiled by Influencer Marketing Hub, four influencers were Indians, and earned between $23,500 and $35,000 per branded post.

The four main alternatives to TikTok are now building on their unique strengths to ensure influencers can reach a mass audience, and help the platforms onboard more users.

Dailyhunt, with its understanding of local content, was one of the first players to identify the opportunity in short video space, and “built capability ahead of other players”, according to Dalal.

MX Player also dabbles in content for the smaller town markets and therefore has a “very good personalisation engine”. Sharechat is like a local language social media, so it understands the regional level audience well. Roposo is the oldest in this space among the four, has a clean interface and can benefit greatly from InMobi’s underlying understanding of users through mobile marketing.

Capturing TikTok’s user base, though, will not be an easy task. Having enough capital is going to be a key requirement, too, because none of these platforms will initially think of monetising through the platform. Once they capture a significant number of users, monetisation could be done either through advertising, social commerce or using different streams such as education.

Dalal expects these platforms to take another six to eight months to reach a level of user metrics that could be comparable to TikTok’s presence in India.

The ByteDance ownership also meant that TikTok was able to invest to keep up with the massive scale that it had acquired. As it began to run into trouble with local and central governments, TikTok put in place content moderation mechanisms, including hiring content moderation teams, to filter out locally insensitive content.

However, capital will not be the only deciding factor in who will replace TikTok.

“TikTok had the first-mover advantage,” said Siddharth Pai, founder of Siana Capital, a tech venture capital firm. “Take the example of Google, which had a problem selling Android devices after others like Samsung took the lead, or even Samsung, which continues to invest in its virtual assistant called Bixby, though Google’s assistant is far ahead. Even for companies as large as these, it is a tough thing to play catch-up”.