Moj grabs the eyeballs after TikTok ban

The platform, owned by Sharechat, had 47.78 million monthly active users (MAUs), followed by Times Internet’s MX TakaTak at 23.95 million, Dailyhunt’s Josh at 14 million and InMobi’s Roposo at 5.51 million, according to MAU data from digital intelligence platform SimilarWeb, sourced from the industry by Mint.

Data from platforms such as SimilarWeb often differ from official numbers shared by platforms because of differences in reporting metrics and access to user data. However, industry experts consider them to be an accurate representation of market trends.

The data also showed that Moj was clocking 14.34 million daily active users (DAUs), while MX TakaTak, Josh and Roposo recorded 6.27 million, 2.60 million and 1.65 million, respectively.

According to Moj, MX TakaTak and Josh, their MAUs stand at 120 million, 150 million and 105 million, respectively. Roposo did not respond to a request for a comment.

That said, the data also shows that one year in, the void left by TikTok’s ban in India has not yet been filled. In June last year, TikTok had said that it had surpassed 200 million users in India and had 120 million MAUs. The short video platform was expected to surpass 300 million users in the country by the end of the year.

According to Gautam Madhavan, founder of influencer marketing firm Mad Influence, smaller influencers who had once left their day jobs to make money from TikTok full time, have either started looking for jobs or are working elsewhere already.

YouTube and Instagram have made space for themselves in the void left by TikTok in terms of marketing money from brands, according to Shudeep Majumdar, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zefmo, another influencer marketing firm.

“Those who used to make a certain amount through three brand campaigns are now doing four or five brand campaigns at reduced budgets,” said Majumdar. “We have not pushed any of these new platforms in the past year and we haven’t received any explicit requests from any of the brands that we have worked with (either),” he said.

The short video market, like any other in social media, is known to be capital-intensive. Platforms have to grow their user base to a certain level before they can seek to monetize. TikTok too had started monetizing its platform just before India banned it.

“We are launching other monetization levers such as livestream virtual gifting in the next few months. One of our brand collaborations with Fanta turned out to be an immensely successful campaign with creators also earning from it,” said Ankush Sachdeva, CEO & co-founder, Moj.