Summarizing the learnings, Akhil Almeida, Vice President (Insights), Kantar, said, “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.”
Key Learnings
- No significant impact on Engagement
The app-ban impacted platforms with a sizeable following. 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.
- Big wins for rival platforms
- Instagram and Facebook saw an immediate increase in engagement.
- Time/Day on Instagram more than doubled (2.3X), and Facebook too saw a significant 35% jump in time-spent on the platform with the bulk of this additional engagement being driven by smaller town consumers.
- Among the youth audience aged below 24 yrs., Avg. Time/Day on Instagram grew by 35%
- Sharechat, India’s very own video sharing platform which focuses content around regional languages also witnessed a 5X increase in time spent.
- This has primarily been driven by the younger faction of internet audience (aged below 24 yrs.). They have more than tripled (3.4X) their Avg. Time/Day on Sharechat since the ban came into effect.
- YouTube is still KING
The most impressive gain was seen on YouTube. Already the most popular digital video platform in the country, it saw a further 25% increase in time-spent!
- OTT also gets a boost
Other players also enjoyed their fair share of rise in engagement levels. 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.