Huge headroom for growth in India: Snap Inc India MD

Bengaluru: Short-form video consumption, since being introduced early in the previous decade, has formed a hold on users from all age groups across the globe, and is expected to reach 650 million users in India alone by 2025, influencing not just lifestyle, but purchase decisions for many. Snapchat, one of the first to introduce the format in India when it entered the country in 2012, is aiming to leverage this growth to further fuel its creator and advertising ecosystem, Snap Inc’s India managing director Pulkit Trivedi told DH’s Anjali Jain. Despite laying off huge chunks of its global staff since 2022, the company remains bullish on India which makes up for 1/4th of its total user base, where it has doubled its workforce in the past 6 month, he said, while expanding on the company's plans for 2024, Snapchat's creator community and the opportunities it sees in terms of advertising.

Snapchat’s India user base stood at 200 million last year. How much has it grown since?

Our community in India continues to grow. And it's a more pan India phenomenon, not just an urban phenomenon. So these 200 million+ is representative of a pan-Indian young demography, not just the top 10 cities. And almost 20 million Snapchatters actually consume content on a monthly basis. Our content consumption on Spotlight, which is our user generated content tab, has tripled in the last few years. We are seeing huge traction, and we believe that our growth will mirror the internet adoption in India.

We were 100 million in 2021, we more than doubled in 2023. And if you put this in the context of the headroom that we have, 900 million internet users, more than 750 million smartphone users. I think the headroom to grow is huge and we see huge potential coming out from India for our daily and monthly users.

What is the age demography of your current user base? Do you plan to expand to older audiences?

A large part of our population is actually 13. And, within the 16 to 24 year old daily Snapchatter category, 78% of them do not use Twitter, 25% don't use YouTube, 55% don't use Facebook daily. So it basically brings you to the point that this is a very unique set of audience that is highly engaged on Snapchat but not using other platforms.

If you are a very prolific Snapchat user, and when you get into the fold in your young adult phase, there is a high likelihood that you will stay engaged on the platform even when you’re older. It's more to do with building the right set of community experiences than trying to force fit, or trying to get older age cohorts adopt your platform. We are a very user centric platform, we know what users like - that the camera is front and centre, that we can enhance augmented reality (AR) experiences, we can deliver the right kind of content that users want. So it's more of a user centric strategy, than trying to take a different approach of getting older users.

What is your revenue generation strategy in India?

The India digital ad market today is roughly about $10 billion and our overall digital adoption metrics in India, whether it's commerce, video, or payments, will more than double by 2030. So we are talking about an ad market which will sit around $20-25 billion in the next eight to 10 years, which means that India will be among the top 3-4 ad markets in the world. We see a huge headroom for us to grow our ad revenue in India.

Why is the company bullish on India even as it is scaling down its global operations?

Out of our 800 million monthly active users globally, more than 200 million come from India. When you look at India from the digital or the consumer internet space, there’s a thriving startup ecosystem, we (the country) are the number one in the digital payment space, we are going to democratise commerce with ONDC. These are never done before global initiatives. And when you put this in the context of what opportunity it provides, the Snap leadership is seeing India as a very strategic country. And therefore, our opportunity to build a very healthy community to grow revenue and to invest in AR capabilities is very real. We've more than doubled our team size in the last six months. We now have people in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore. So it's very evident that the Snap leadership sees this as a very big opportunity to invest.

What will be your focus areas in 2024?

We will be the platform that continues to grow our community of young Indians. Second, we want to continue to invest in building a very robust creator ecosystem, we will continue to invest in building a very strong AR ecosystem locally in India. And lastly, we would like to take all of this value package and try to create and deliver value for our advertiser ecosystem in India to help us build a sustained business here.