Facebook, Instagram see huge surge in user engagements after ban on Chinese apps in India: Kantar

Time spent in the video OTT space grew by 40% overall once the ban on Chinese apps was imposed in India

Due to the Covid-19 outbreak, several governments imposed lockdown across the world in March 2020. People were to asked to self-isolate at home. Adults and kids were forced to work and learn online, respectively.

With no chance of physically moving around outside to socialise, people, for want of entertainment and distraction from the pandemic, moved on to social media websites and Over-The-Top (OTT) apps to watch movies, TV shows and other stuff.

Here in India, short video sharing platforms such as TikTok, Helo, Likee, Kwai and Bigo Live and others had several crores of followers. But, In late June 2020, the Indian government citing threat to citizens' privacy security, banned 59 Chinese apps in the country. Following the ban, several rival local and international social media and utility apps witnessed a significant surge in user engagements.

Leading market research firm Kantar and the partner consulting company’s Web Audience Measurement (WAM) panel report said-- "Given that users were spending hours every week across these platforms, one would have expected to see a dip in the overall time spent online once these platforms were no longer accessible. However, the avg. time-spent dropped only marginally (-6%), indicating that consumers were switching over to rival platforms much faster than anticipated."

The report added that the average time (or day) spent by the users on Instagram increased by more than double (2.3X). Facebook too witnessed a massive 35% surge in time spent on the platform with the most the extra traffic driven by smaller town consumers.

Among the youth audience aged below 24 years, average time on Instagram grew by 35-percent, Kantar noted.

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Also, the indigenous TikTok-rival app ShareChat too witnessed increased user-engagement by more than 2.5 times the normal average after the ban on Chineses apps.

“Although consumers lost access to some of their favourite short-form video sharing apps, the bulk of consumers switched over to alternate platforms in an almost seamless manner. We saw that overall time-spent online was not as strongly impacted as one might have expected, given the size and scale of the affected platforms," said Akhil Almeida, Vice President (Insights), Kantar.

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Popular digital video content platform, YouTube too saw a 25-percent increase in average time spent by the users.

Furthermore, Hotstar, India’s leading Video OTT player saw their daily time spent grow by over 25%. Time spent in the video OTT space grew by 40% overall once the ban was imposed, Kantar report said.

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