Eloelo: Defining a “digital third place” for the new age Indian
Humans are inherently social beings. We spend over 80% of our typical day sleeping, working/studying, eating, and doing chores. These hours are generally spent at our first and second places — our home, and our workplace. The rest of our 20% is spent in third place(s).
This term “third place” coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg in the 1980s indicated spaces, where people could gather, converse, and exist without necessarily spending a ton of money. Coffee shops, malls, book clubs, places of worship, etc. are a few typical examples. Oldenburg was referring to physical spaces while coining the term. However, the last two decades have redefined this term to have a digital meaning.
With its digital forums and chat rooms, AOL brought the first wave of this conviviality in the 90s. The 2000s brought a new wave of social networking platforms with Myspace, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr and so on.
All these platforms, in their first iteration, were interactive in nature but limited to text, visual, and audio-based content. Live video interaction was missing, until Twitch was birthed in 2011, the same year YouTube rolled out live streaming.
All the above platforms, which Indians have adopted over the years are primarily imported apps. However, a product built focusing on the local audience as the core consumer was absent. One such homegrown platform that solved this was Sharechat.
The second wave of homegrown platforms that originated from the thesis of digital third place has grown in the last 5 years. One such platform is Eloelo — India Ka Live adda (India’s live hangout).
Eloelo was founded in 2021 as live streaming was being adopted as a new social language across the globe; attributing the industry growth to the novel coronavirus. Globally, the live-streaming sector grew 45% between March and April’20 and the industry grew 99% year on year.
While the industry was seeing inflection points globally, a white space for an India-first live interactive third place was created.
Tapping into the unbundling of TV and democratized internet access in India
One of the earliest forms of mass media in India was through the launch of radio broadcasting in 1927. Post-independence, India witnessed the launch of a new media form, Doordarshan, the first public service broadcaster in 1959.
These media forms were highly regularized, until the early 1990s, which opened doors for private media operations to launch businesses in India.
From a lack of imagination in B&W TV programming to colour transmission TV in 1982, satellite TV came to India in 1991 through CNN and Star TV.
As for radio, strict central regulation never allowed the media channel to take off in a big way in the country. By the time commercial FM radio was freed up in 2000, most other media channels had raced ahead. Unlike the early 2000s, newer mobile phones today do not come with an inbuilt FM option.
Over the last decade, TV content has been unbundled and offered via multiple digital platforms — for music, movies, reality shows, and so on.
Media consumption in India was truly unlocked with cheap data. The late 2010s have served as a period of digital democratization in the country. As of September 2022, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India reported 65.5 million paid DTH subscribers in India, compared to 850.9 million internet subscribers in the country.
Just as TV did at the beginning of the millennium, as OTT video streaming did a decade ago, interactive media is now redefining both storytellers and audiences all over again. Eloelo marries entertainment templates with live interactive formats, creating space for a new third place.
In the 90s TV shows in India revolved around game formats such as Antakshari and Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?). Eloelo’s thesis was to tap into the shifting consumer behaviour from TV-based content consumption to mobile-based content consumption. Eloelo’s product entry was by offering nostalgic social games that already have cultural resonance by adding a core layer of interactivity to them.
Eloelo piloted live streaming with household-name game formats. In H1 2021, they introduced tambola and musical chairs. In the last two years, they have grown from hosting a couple hundred live streams in a day to over 50k live streams today. The platform pioneered in offering interactions and games inside live streams, all built natively.
The creator/host engages with users across multiple live formats via either social games, performances, astrology, or chat rooms. These templates marry the core philosophies –
1. Engagement in communities is a human need and
2. External appreciation boosts self-confidence.
These philosophies when married with real-time live interactions boost serotonin and dopamine. The platform’s strong network effects corroborate this.
Eloelo took 21 months to cross their first 5 million users (while they were testing the initial game format templates), the next 5 million took 5 months after, and the time gap shortened to 3 and 2 months respectively till they hit 20 million+ registered users.
Currently, the platform offers over 20 interactive templates and has observed MAUs grow 22x over the last two years. Their WAU/MAU ratio has consistently been around 60% — projecting TV-like viewership behaviour.
Being on TV is still considered to be aspirational for most Indians
Indians grow up in tight-knit societies and tend to over-index on factors such as celebrity status and gratification. Social media platforms have democratized access to these factors, serving as the genesis for the creator economy. Indians are now embracing their own digital identities with the rise of regional, language content, translating that into the growth of regional influencers.
The creator economy has unlocked access to new professions beyond the ambit of pursuing traditional careers such as medicine or engineering. Social clout has become a chase for the GenZ and millennial audience.
A live social entertainment platform like Eloelo appeals directly to the need of young Indians to communicate with each other, express themselves, and fulfill their desire to participate in digital communities with like-minded people.
To enter the YouTube Partner Program, a creator must have at least 1000 subscribers, with a minimum of 4k+ watch hours on public videos in the last twelve months or 10 million public views on shorts in the last 90 days. The tools and skillset required for becoming a successful creator that can monetize on YouTube have high barriers to entry.
The live templates on Eloelo are easy tools that enable the creator to host live streams without the need to have a script or prep for hosting. These tools have birthed a new generation of creators who are not Instagram or YouTube natives. Eloelo is home to 50k+ creators who are active in a month, with the number of creators who have hosted at least one live stream since June’21 has grown 5x today.
The platform offers a gamified solution to keep the creators engaged with follower milestones, detailed interaction insights, and features that make the live stream hosting a seamless experience for them.
In addition, Indian women on social platforms have historically been scarce due to a lack of relevant content and often due to online harassment. Eloelo has been successful in ensuring a balanced gender demographic attracting over 42–45% of its users being female and over 70–75% of creators being female.
The company has baked in a robust moderation stack to ensure a safe space for users. They have invested heavily in metadata training, leveraging AI + ML to detect any inappropriate content, ensuring they keep the content on the platform safe for a family audience. With scale and time, the algorithm has only improved, helping Eloelo scale its moderation effects while keeping the accuracy intact.
Eloelo has also added a second layer to moderation by empowering its power users, entrusting co-hosts in streams to act as guardians for users.
The strong moderation stack has helped the company offer safe, moderated, family-friendly, interactive games and content.
A recent example of live engagement on the app with user co-creation was on August 24, 2023. The day was a proud moment for all Indians with Chandrayaan-3’s soft landing on the moon. The live broadcast of Chandrayaan-3’s landing was watched by over 100K users on the Eloelo app, where nearly 1 million comments were sent using the “Jai Hind” Flag in this live stream.
Eloelo amplifies the power of shared experience with its live audio and video interaction templates.
Growing monetization for digital entertainment in India
India currently has the 5th cheapest data rate in the world, with an average cost per GB of $0.17 per month. In other words, the price of 1GB of mobile data in India costs 241 times less than in the US. Cheap data access in India can be translated to per capita data usage growing 16% year on year, expected to reach ~62 GB/month/user in 2028 from ~26 GB/month/user in 2022 — which is the highest in the world and 60% more than the global average.
Combining the exploding data consumption with the rising emergence of digital payments, monetization behaviour that was previously thought impossible has now been unlocked. India’s digital payments transactions in 2022 were more than the combined digital payments of the US, UK, Germany, and France, accounting for $1.5 trillion in digital payments transactions in 2022. Digital payments now account for 40% of total annual transactions in India- this is expected to hit 65% in 2026.
More importantly, 45% of all digital payments are towards retail, travel, entertainment, and consumption i.e., all discretionary expenses.
In terms of spending behaviour on entertainment, we see this exhibit in various ways, particularly with respect to gaming. As per the Lumikai State of India gaming report FY 22 India is home to 507 million gamers, of which 24% are paying users. The average revenue per user for games in India grew from $2 in FY18 to $20/year in FY22. The gaming industry has seen strong monetization growth in the country, led particularly by in-app purchases growing at a 34% CAGR.
In addition, we see an increased willingness to spend on entertainment across various platforms and mediums. According to Ormax’s estimates, in 2022, India was home to a video streaming audience of 423 million. Out of which, it is estimated that there are 119 million active paid Over-the-Top (OTT) platform subscriptions (such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+Hotstar, etc). These subscriptions have grown 35% year-on-year since 2019.
After observing success with localised subscription pricing starting at INR99/month ($1.21), Netflix has taken its India playbook to replicate success stories in 116 other countries globally. Netflix saw a 30% growth in customer engagement and a 24% growth Y-o-Y in revenue in India after it launched a lower subscription plan. India was also the fastest-growing market for Netflix globally, with the highest subscription additions in 2022.
In the broader interactive market, domestic apps such as Sharechat registered $50 million in annual revenue run rate (ARR) for their virtual gifting offering in 2022. Virtual gifting is offered in live audio rooms for Sharechat. Another localized platform, KukuFM, an audiobook-based platform for regional content observed a 4x growth in active paid subscribers in the last twelve months as of March 2023.
Additionally, in February 2023, LinkedIn India crossed 100 million users, making India the second largest market after the US. As per Sensor Tower, LinkedIn also saw an 85% jump in revenue in India in the LTM to the February’23 period compared to 6% in the year prior.
Carrying forward the increase in subscriptions trend, Spotify India also observed a 10x-fold increase in the number of subscriptions since 2019. In its early days, 70% of consumption on the platform was international music, but now it is 70% local music.
The above exemplifies the growing trend of in-app purchases for Indian users. Moreover, the market size attributed to live streaming in India is expected to be over $2 billion (Source: QY Research) in 2023. This is split across live chatrooms, gaming, talent shows, and dating apps.
Eloelo as a social gaming platform captures most of these use cases with its proprietary game rooms, live shows, and chatrooms for a diverse demographic.
Innovating in live stream formats with social interaction at its core
Over the last two years, the company has consistently innovated to push out new features and initiatives. They launched the multi-creator video feature in August’21. They further expanded to performances and other genres of live templates such as astrology towards the end of 2021.
Currently, the app offers content in 6 regional Indian languages, with tier-2 cities leading usage. 21–27-year-old GenZ and millennials make up for over 50% of the platform’s users. This makes Eloelo a lucrative platform for distribution and visibility for brands focusing on the Indian youth.
Eloelo has since partnered with the likes of Radio Mirchi, The Viral Fever, T-Series to name a few.
For Valentine’s Day this year, Eloelo launched India’s first online reality show, Love House. The show was streamed live for 144 hours, passing the world record for a continuous live stream on a mobile phone. The show observed 4 million views on livestream across 6 days, with a peak concurrency of over 200k viewers. Love House also served as a distribution channel for Bollywood movie Shehzada’s promotion.
The company has consistently innovated to introduce new live formats that appeal to the broader Indian audience. Cricket is the most widely watched sport in India. In 2022, they launched “Eloelo Premier League” which was the company’s version of a two-screen concept while watching the Indian Premier League. On this live stream template, users could predict what will happen on the next ball, while watching live commentary. This resulted in a united sport watching experience, adding the thrill of real-time interactive gameplay.
Recently, Eloelo received the second spot in Google Play Store’s top charts in the entertainment category in India. Eloelo surpassed both global and domestic OTT apps such as Disney+Hotstar, Prime Video, Zee5 and Netflix in the top charts. This corroborates their narrative of redefining digital third-place experiences for the new-age Indian across tiers of cities and towns.
Having cracked PMF, engagement, and stickiness, the company is now focused on scaling its 10 to 100 journey. They will be launching new product features with innovative social game templates and additional modes for live interaction for their users. With strong user engagement, Eloelo has also demonstrates strong network effects on account of an early established K-Factor with organic traffic and referrals growing fast while maintaining high stickiness.
We at Lumikai are lucky to have witnessed the growth trajectory of Eloelo from the passenger seat. We look forward to continuing our support to the company and witnessing the new heights it is yet to unlock.
