News and ebooks mobile application Dailyhunt has picked up a minority stake for Rs 15 crore in OneIndia, the local news language portal owned by Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh.
The duo were the brains behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s digital strategy during the 2014 elections and the investment will help Dailyhunt expand its partnership with OneIndia, which is owned by Greynium Information Technologies. The deal will help Dailyhunt, which focuses on local language users, generate multimedia content, especially short format video and audio, for its platform. The two companies already have a content partnership.
“It’s time for local language content generation to go more deep, like it has in English. We need content in both audio and video, and more short format content appealing to the demographics of the country. We are supporting non-news content with this investment,” said Virendra Gupta, founder & CEO of Dailyhunt.
Gupta will also join the board of Greynium. OneIndia was founded in January 2006 by BG Mahesh and provides local language content and publishes content across genres such as lifestyle, entertainment, technology, automobiles, travel, personal finance and education in eight local languages.
Besides OneIndia, its websites include that’s Cricket, Filmi Beat and Career India. It reaches 35 million unique visitors and 500-million page views a month.
OneIndia was initially funded by Jain, who sold his portal India-World to Sify for Rs 499 crore during the dotcom bubble in 2000. He acquired the company in 2010 through his company Netcore.
Jain was also an investor in Greynium when it started out.
“Greynium has been a key player in the local languages space, and this position will be further strengthened by Dailyhunt’s reach across India. It also ties in well with our plans for producing video content in vernacular languages, which we expect to be the next big growth wave for us,” said Mahesh.
“It is estimated that 56 per cent of Indians showed preferences for video downloads with 85 per cent viewers consuming short form video content (under 10 minutes) on smartphones as against 71 per cent on laptops.
This trend is going to be important for marketers to be able to reach these customers through smart and concise messaging,” according to FICCI Frames report 2016.
The investment is part of the broader bet by Daily Hunt to focus on generating revenues from advertising dollars, as global multinationals are also increasing their spend on digital with increasing smartphone penetration.