Short-form video market

The accelerated growth of the short-form video market in India has been on the back of homegrown apps. According to a RedSeer Consulting report, short form content has grown 1.37 times in terms of monthly active users and 1.1 times in terms of daily active users in India, with Indian platforms capturing a huge chunk of the market.

Short-form videos are everywhere nowadays. The platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, Google, and LinkedIn are expanding their short-form offerings, and brands are continuing to take notice. Short-form video has the highest ROI of any social media marketing strategy as 30% of social media marketers plan to invest in it more than any other trend in 2022.

With a 300 million monthly active user base, Indian ShortForm is going ‘viral.’ In just two years, Indian apps have matured significantly. Due to the rapidly improving quality of content and algorithms in Indian ShortForm apps, it is expected to reach an MAU of 550-600 Million and penetrate nearly 67% of all smartphone users by 2025.

The short-form video market is on the stage of explosion, we must take a few steps back to the country’s large digital community and its insatiable hunger for online videos. Average Indian users spend nearly 38 minutes per day watching ShortForm content. Gripping content aside, there are various reasons why Indian ShortForm content is overtaking LongForm.

First, the sheer size of the user base plays a critical role; there are nearly 700-750 million internet users in India spending approximately 1.3 trillion hours online. This is second only to China. Smartphone users also spend about 4.8 hours on their devices daily, of which an hour on average is spent consuming videos. Another factor is the increased penetration of smartphones in Tier 2 cities and below—from 46% to 80%.

The short-form content also breaks the curve with low decision fatigue and an endless content library. The opportunity only grows more prominent, amounting to $12-19 billion, if we combine the three primary levers for monetization i.e., video-led commerce, digital advertising, and gifting. With this the growth of social media is causing the human attention span to become shorter and shorter.

In China, video content-led commerce was the most significant driver, growing 100X in 4 years. If India follows suit as it has in other areas, video-led commerce on ShortForm apps could be a gamechanger. It is currently projected to comprise 8-11billion of the total. The current stage of ShortForm app acceptance seems to be simply the prelude of a promising and long-lasting saga, with continual algorithm advancements further pushing content viewership across segments.

S Mohini Ratna, Editor, VARINDIA