BENGALURU: Dailyhunt, the Indian news and entertainment aggregator which specialises in regional language content, plans to ramp up its challenge to other content providers with the appointment of the former head of Facebook India.

Umang Bedi, who officially left Facebook in January, is taking over as Dailyhunt’s new president where he will report to founder Virendra Gupta with a mission to build revenues and the platform’s user base.

“We will focus on three metrics – increasing number of users, how we can grow engagement and revenue. I believe Dailyhunt can differentiate to win market share in the advertising space and be an independent platform of scale,” Bedi told The Economic Times.

“Umang’s background in social media content and experience leading scaled teams generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues is a great fit with our plans. To fight the big boys, you need experienced executives like him,” added Gupta.

Founded in 2009, Dailyhunt has built up an active monthly user base of 80m people, who access its database of more than 250,000 news articles in 14 languages.

According to a 2017 study by KPMG and Google, entitled Indian Languages – Defining India’s Internet, regional language users will account for 75% of India’s Internet user base by 2021, or about 536m users.

With such an opportunity beckoning, Dailyhunt has been expanding its product suite and recently introduced Newzly, a news-in-brief app in nine Indian languages to compete with start-ups like NewsPoint, which is part of Times Internet.

As explained by Gupta: “The idea is to get into more video options soon too, besides other offerings, eventually creating a family of apps that caters to all kinds of users, in the language of their choice, as well as focusing on increasing personalisation for the user, based on their interests.”

Sourced from The Economic Times; additional content by WARC staff