Comparing short video platforms in India
In June 2020, Tiktok was banned in India. This was a big loss for a lot of content creators, especially those that had a huge following on TikTok. These content creators migrated to the several TikTok clones that popped up almost immediately.
A few months later, I decided to run informal experiments to compare the potential of these platforms for marketing. The fact that all of these challengers had started operations at almost the same time, made for an optimal experiment setup.
According to AppAnnie, the TikTok challengers with the most users were:
- MXTakatak
- Josh
- Moj
- Roposo
I was unable to install MXTakatak (since it wasn't available on App Stores outside India). On the rest of the Apps, I created a new account and started to share content (about 8 short videos over 5-6 months).
My observations:
- Josh had the highest number of views/engagement, followed by Moj and finally Roposo. This sort-of corresponds to reported userbase of these Apps.
- In comparison with the incumbent (Instagram), posts on these platforms get 5-10x the amount of views / likes / shares.
- Once a video is posted, these platforms seem to continue to receive views for a few days, in contrast with Instagram, for which I observed a steep drop in traffic the following day.
- Tools or APIs to schedule posts don't seem to be supported (unlike Facebook/Instagram). Therefore one needs to manually upload content to each one.
- The Analytics on all of these apps are basic compared to Instagram. It's unclear how many of these views lead to profile views and click-through to a website listed on your profile.
