With its 3 year anniversary, Bolo Live is committed to broadening the avenues of the app. The social live streaming platform is planning to bring more monetization streams for creators in the future. MI speaks with Varun Saxena, CEO, and Founder, of Bolo Live in an exclusive interview.
“There is a rising demand for Indian creators as they can have a good connection with the Indians living in the middle east and western countries. We expect made-in-India live-streaming apps to go global and register India’s presence globally.” Says Saxena while he was dropping a light on India’s position on creators’ economy
Read the full interview here:
Q) Tell us more about Bolo Live.
Varun: Launched in May 2019, Bolo Live is India’s first and fastest-growing creator economy focused social live streaming platform, with total funding of USD 3.5 million. Bolo Live has recently raised USD 2.4 million as a precursor to Series A, led by Orios Venture Partners. SOSV, Tremis Capital, LPA Ventures, and other HNIs also participated in its first VC round including existing investors Eagle 10 Ventures.
Bolo Live straddles the unique amalgamation of live streaming, gamification, and consumer microtransactions. At Bolo Live, we empower fans to connect, live chat, engage with and build communities with their favorite live streamers in their preferred languages. The platform has crossed more than 5 million downloads on Google PlayStore, with iOS growing strong as well at more than 2.5 million installs. Besides this, the live entertainment app has received positive ratings, which stand at 4.2 stars out of 5 as of April 18, 2022. The app ranks highest consistently in the lifestyle category on Google Playstore, and amongst the top 150 apps across categories.
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Bolo Live is on the mission to democratize monetization for every content creator by bringing them closer to their fans, and not letting content creators be solely dependent on earnings through brand partnerships and shopping affiliate revenue. We are disrupting this by empowering content creators with direct fans-driven monetization opportunities leveraging the active engagement that video live streaming has to offer.
Q) How does the app help content creators earn or monetize?
Varun: Bolo Live streaming feature comes with integrated real-time gamification driven by microtransactions led gifting options and aims to create the world’s largest active engagement and behavioral science-driven entertainment platform from India, with love from across the globe.
Today the largest monetization opportunity available to the content creators on the platform is where the audiences give virtual gifts to live streamers of their choice. The value of these gifts can be redeemed as actual cash hitting the bank account of content creators through UPI or to their PayTM/PhonePe wallets.
In order to give virtual gifts, fans purchase diamonds on the platform by paying actual cash. Top creators are already making close to INR 2 lakh per month from the platform, with over 110 creators making more than 1 lakh per month. Cumulatively, content creators are making close to INR 1.75 crore per month from the platform.
Q) How is the Creator market growing after the pandemic?
Varun: India’s creator market is poised to see over 400 million users by the end of 2022. The pandemic being the driving force, India has witnessed an exciting addition of UGC and PUGC live streamers to the foray, leading to the addition of never seen categories in the live streaming ecosystem. Research shows that the live streaming market will be worth over $247 billion by 2027 and that 47% of people are streaming more live videos than ever. Affordability, accessibility, and ubiquity of creation tools have been the major tools for creators to supplement their income, and this trend surged during stay-at-home measures. India is a land of more than 50 million content creators spread across global apps and the global creator market size has also seen significant growth of over $104 billion.
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Q) Where does India stand in terms of the creator economy?
Varun: Just the live streaming-led monetization opportunities for content creators stand at a market size of close to 11.4 billion USD as of 2022, and growing at close 24% CAGR. Anyone who is active on social media has probably noticed that the race to become an influencer has begun. The market will inevitably see a large influx of creators, and due to the growing crowd, the likelihood of creators becoming lost is greater than that of becoming noticed. India is very well placed in live streaming and will dominate the industry in the next 5 years, some industry leaders believe.
There is a rising demand for Indian creators as they can have a good connection with the Indians living in the middle east and western countries. We expect made in India live streaming apps to go global and register India’s presence globally.
Q) Live streaming and its contribution to the creator economy.
Varun: The Creator Era is underway in several industries: live broadcasting, video, e-commerce, podcasts, and certain kinds of games. Social apps that offer live streaming as a prominent feature account for $3 of every $4 spent in the top social apps in the first half of 2021.
India is set to dominate the live streaming industry for the next five years, shrinking the gap between China in terms of total time spent. The coming years are expected to see massive growth in Tier II and Tier III cities fueling the community with over 100 million creators in the next few years.
Just on Bolo Live, the paying user base has grown close to 350K unique users on a monthly basis with an average ticket size of INR 90. Retention of paying users is very high as these users prefer to engage in communities and interact on a regular basis with the live streamers who they are gifting and remain very loyal to the platform due to the gratification opportunities that increase with every increase in spending by them.
Q) What kind of response are you getting from investors?
Varun: We have been getting a very encouraging response from the investor community, credit to the enduring business model we have, unit economics with a clear path to profitability without compromising growth, and how we can build a large platform with capital efficiency.
We have raised a total of USD 3.5 million to date. Bolo Live has recently raised USD 2.4 million as a precursor to Series A, led by Orios Venture Partners. SOSV, Tremis Capital, LPA Ventures, and other HNIs also participated in its first VC round including existing investors Eagle 10 Ventures.
Q) There is a huge rise in the number of users on your platform. How is this helping the brand?
Varun: We are working on some innovative live interaction-driven solutions for brands and shall soon be rolling out them to the top FMCGs and E-Commerce players to start off with. We believe that the creator economy is a full-fledged ecosystem in itself and brands are an important stakeholder in this. We do not want to offer vanilla solutions to them because what live streaming may offer to them is a lot more than what usual Facebook, Instagram, or short video apps may offer.
Q) Future plans?
Varun: Our major focus area will be to further broaden the avenues on the app through which content creators may monetize the live interactions with their fans on the platform. There will be new monetization streams launched for creators in the next couple of quarters.
These will include avenues that will be built both out of web2.0 and web3.0 – we are doing internal experiments, and pilots and closely working with some of the super users before finally rolling out these monetization elements that shall exponentially enhance the creator earnings as well as the engagement between fans and the creators.
