The company has crossed 50 million downloads and should be reaching the 100 million downloads mark over the next one year, he said.
“As an app which just started at the onset of the pandemic we have seen tremendous growth over the last two and a half years. Our monthly active users range between 10-12 million. While our downloads keep increasing, our focus is on increasing engagement. We have grown significantly in the last one year. 60% of our audience only speaks Hindi on the platform,” he added.
On Elon Musk announcing that Twitter will charge $ 8 a month for a blue tick verification, Radhakrishna said he does not foresee a lot of users paying for verification in India.
“There might be a small percentage who will still pay, but they might be more internationally relevant folks. Anybody who wants to be a part of an international community on microblogging and would want to be actively there might still pay. But anybody who is India focused will not pay,” he added.
He said Koo will not charge users for verification. “We want to promote genuine people for our yellow tick eminence verification and charging for such a fundamental feature doesn’t make sense based on the Indian market. In a market like India where, even Netflix is not getting as much money or charging differential rates where they are giving out high quality movies on a platter… and even then they are not able to make as much money as they would like to..In India, charging for verification doesn’t make sense and we will not do that,” he added.
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Radhakrishna said the market has become bearish and a lot more efficiency is expected from platforms. “We brought forward our monetisation plans and opened for advertisers in September. Our first set of advertisers were across real money gaming apps, fin tech apps. Some other direct to consumer brands and commerce players have also advertised with us. We have got over 30 advertisers in the last one month and this base will keep growing. We expect to roll out our automated ad engine by the end of the year which will help advertisers self-serve ads on the platform,” he said.
There has been a lot of ‘word of mouth growth’ and Koo’s engagement rates have doubled compared to last year, Radhakrishna said.
“Today almost 40-50% of our downloads come through people referring each other. This used to be 10-15% last year. Our engagement rates have doubled compared to last year, whether it’s time spent on the platform, or daily, weekly, monthly retention,” he added.
Currently, Koo is available in 10 languages including Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Punjabi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Bengali and English. The company claims there are over ‘7500 eminent voices’ on the platform besides ‘millions’ of students, teachers, entrepreneurs, poets, leaders, writers, artists and actors.
60% of the users are communicating in Hindi on the platform while 25% of users are from other Indian languages and 15% users communicate in English. “Among the 25%, we have Bangla, Marathi, Telugu and Kannada as the major languages,” Radhakrishna said.
