“Our decentralized model has been core to this growth allowing anyone to work for Twitter from anywhere opening up more opportunities for people at a pan India level. The hires across verticals are a testimony of our commitment to grow our team in India and build a service that is made in India, for Indians. In India, we have teams across all three global engineering lines of business- Revenues/ ads, consumer and core technology platform teams,” he said.
Dalal said the company has a roadmap to achieve growth that aligns with its global goal of reaching 315 million mDAU (number of monetizable daily active Twitter users) by quarter four 2023, and local teams and expertise can help make this happen faster.
“Some of our teams at Twitter in India are working on developing global solutions. We believe that learnings and innovation from India would be a key lever to better serve Twitter audiences in similar Android-first markets. Our goal is to innovate in India for our audiences here and take those solutions to the world,” he added.
Shirish Andhare, director and head of product at Twitter India said fans love to come to Twitter to follow cricket, and that it is experimenting with a new cricket specific tab for a ‘dedicated and immersive’ cricket experience on the platform.
Starting this week, Twitter will be testing a cricket tab on its explore page, rolling out the experiment to a percentage of people in India who use Twitter on Android.
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“Earlier in January, we also started testing a revamped, more personalized explore page to make it easier for people to unwind, find new interests and see what’s happening. In February, we integrated Paytm as an additional payment provider for Twitter’s Tips feature. With the addition of Paytm as a payment provider, people will be able to make payments using UPI, credit and debit cards, and netbanking, among other options,” he added.
Andhare said the platform is also ‘actively’ innovating across a broad selection of content in a variety of languages and formats that are unique to the needs of India, its pastimes and passions. “We will be innovating in media rich content and creators across a diverse range of topics and languages while doubling down on creating the best experiences for India’s passions like cricket,” he added.
The number of monetizable daily active users in India grew by 74% year over year in quarter four 2020 as per the company. Speaking separately at the #WhatsHappening2022 India event, Dalal said the India tech scene has never been ‘more robust’, and that the country is a hotbed for innovation with open source development at its very core.
“Today there are close to 6 million developers in India. Twitter too has strong aspirations for India, a priority market for us. We are constantly piloting new features and learning from people’s experience on the service. We are available in 11 Indic languages. Infact, almost 50% of tweets in India are now in languages other than English,” he added.
Andhare said the company wants to continue making it easier for all the new people joining twitter to join in the conversations they care about, while having agency over their experience and being aware of the key ways they can participate in and facilitate healthy conversations on the platform.
“Next, we want them to get to the interests, the connections, and the content they care about as quickly as possible and without the barriers of language. We are continuing to make rapid innovations in our language experience and infrastructure. Globally, 280 million accounts follow at least one topic with more than 14,500 topics available across 11 international languages including Hindi,” he said.
“Our third focus area recognizes that people on Twitter in India have a diverse local set of interests. But that there are also some very universal passions that bind them together. We plan to focus on fostering online communities and bringing them even closer while enabling everyone to discover information, learn, be entertained and grow together,” he added.
