One of the fastest growing digital media startups in India, ScoopWhoop, shed light on its financials just yesterday. On one hand, where the company saw a massive three-fold increase in revenues, the losses surged more than 150 percent in the fiscal year ended March 2016. This development has been spotted by LiveMint in a filing with the Registrar of Companies (RoC).
During this fiscal year, the filing mentions that the losses soared to a massive Rs 6.48 crore on the back of nearly Rs 10 crores in revenues. But, what’s impressive is the fact that the company spent more than Rs 16 crores as compared to Rs 5.2 crore in the previous fiscal year. It has been hard at work producing new web series and improving the content on their platform.
In the said period, ScoopWhoop invested in further expanding its video production as well as editorial teams. They also hired people to fill business-to-business (B2B) marketing roles and expedite its efforts to court more clients for branded content development. They’ve also been on-boarded to help control advertisement expenses and increase traffic.
The company generates revenue from display ads and native advertising. ScoopWhoop’s increase in revenue indicates higher spending on digital advertising, video content production. The platform claims to register as much as 380 million engagement each month. This, the company hopes, will evidently enable them to court bigger brands and partnerships in the near future. Speaking on the same, Sattvik Mishra, the co-founder and CEO of ScoopWhoop, says,
Traffic has gone up 100% from last year. From 15 million unique users to 30 million unique users today and this includes all the three properties: ScoopWhoop, Vagabomb and Gazabpost.
The Bharti Softbank-backed media company currently operates the three aforementioned online media platforms. The prominent most one being their news and entertainment website ScoopWhoop.com, women-focused content platform Vagabomb.com, and Hindi content website Gazabpost.com. It had previously secured a massive $4 million investment from the aforementioned backer and Kalaari Capital in late 2015.
Further, talking about their vision for the platform, Mishra adds,
What we have seen is that audiences consume video content more, so anyway it makes sense to engage in the format that they like and video is a clear winner. And what we have seen is that brands also want to invest in video content and you are able to tell a better brand story in the video format compared to text.
The company has recently acquired Touchfone, a video streaming company that specializes in video-on-demand, live streaming, and a video streaming technologies. It already operated a streaming platform called Strmeasy and will use similar infrastructure to enhance its video ads alongside monetizing and streaming videos in low bandwidth.
