Regional content app Matrubharti onboarded brands like AMUL, Waghbakri and Ramdev Masala as advertisers

Regional content app segment is seeing phenominal growth in India and the content is availabe in various formats like long text, short text, short videos, long videos, audio books and podecasts. Regional text content is not new to India but other formats like video and audio on mobile have started showing unimaginable growth in traction.

Monetization in regional content space is a challenge, the best way to earn from the content and community of vernacular startups is to build own ads inventory. A huge set of hyper local brands addressing local markets are waiting to get a showcase but conventional digital spaces like Google and Facebook family apps are not focused towards that market. Majority of vernacular users on Google and Facebook skip ads without putting much effort.

The regional content startups like Matrubharti are among few who have nailed the business model in this challenge. Matrubharti has long text content and quality videos called Vishesh on their platform. That creates good time and space for advertisers to enage with consumers.

Matrubharti has started their own advertisement inventory since 2020, today they have popular brands like AMUL, Ramdev Masala, Waghbakri as their clients. They are advertising on Matrubharti various ways to promote their brand and leveraging Matrubharti’s presence in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. There are popular banner ads and video ads model offered to brands while in-story branding model is also very prominent model for adverisers. Here the brand becomes integral part of the story.

Mr Pradeep Patel, Director of Ramdev Masala and Food Products said “ Ramdev Food Products and Masala is into the business of spices since 1965, since then it has been the household brand for Gujarat and other states in India, Matrubharti has helped us to take our brand to the new heights with their presence in tier 2 and 3 cities, their young reader base in regional languages is the right match for our brand promotion campaigns.”

Mr Nilesh Shah, Co Founder of Matrubharti said “ We are helping indian brands to reach to the bottom of pyramid, Matrubharti’s cotnent consumers are based in cities where brands have challenges to reach to consumers, so we are the bridge between the brand and consumer, it has worked really well for our advertisers”

Matrubharti has over 1M monthly active users, 70% of them are between the age of 18-36 years, over 600K content pieces are shared on Matrubharti in text, video and audio in vernacular languages. Consumers are spending over 45 minutes per day on this platform using app and web.

Mahendra Sharma, CEO of Matrubharti said “There is a huge market opportunity waiting for Indian vernacular content startups. While google and facebook are earning sizable amout from Indian adverisers, a major chunk of domestic advertisers would not mind to select Indian startup like Matrubharti if they are given competitive rates and desired visiblity in their targetted geographies“

India would continue to consume a huge set of content for free but there is an appetite to pay for premium content, the increasing subscribers of OTT players, News portals and various other digital products are showing the clear indication that the customer is ready to pay. It is only the matter of time that startups think business before growth and make money from their customers.

The story is very clear and loud, India is going to see it’s own internet content space with content created and published by Indians and consumed by Indians.