UCWeb plans US$29.37 million outlay to tap mobile content potential in India, Indonesia
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Rebecca Hawkes
| 23 January 2017

Aiming to fulfil its ambition to dominate India and Indonesia’s user-generated content sector, Chinese mobile Internet company UCWeb is investing INR2 billion (US$29.37 million) over the next two years.

The Alibaba-owned company’s UC News distribution and content platform, which serves as source of trending and curated news to be consumed via mobile devices, became the most popular news app on Google Play within five months of its launch in India.

“As India enters the age of increased content consumption through its mobile devices, there is a huge potential for the growth of user-generated content in India similar to what has happened in China,” said Alibaba mobile business group president (overseas business) Jack Huang.

“There are more than 600 million mobile users and 20 million online content creators in China, whereas India currently has 371 million mobile users with miniscule contribution from self-publishing outlining a huge demand-supply gap. UCWeb has adopted a strategy of becoming a leading content distribution platform. As such, our flagship product UC Browser has also transformed itself from being the No 1 mobile browser in India, according to StatCounter. India is the most critical overseas market for UCWeb and this investment will help bring in the global mobile Internet to an era of ‘GUF’ (Google, UCWeb, and Facebook).”

UC News is available in Hindi, Indonesian and English, and integrates trending content from social media and partners with traditional media, self-publishers and key opinion leaders for original content.

UC News recently unveiled a monetary compensation plan so that unique content can be offered and its position as a content distribution platform can be consolidated further. In addition, the platform can allow contributors to accrue traffic, revenue, and followers using its Big Data technology and smart content distribution system.

Commenting on the investment and what it will mean, Alibaba mobile business group GM (overseas business) Kenny Ye said: “With growth in consumption of information feeds, non-conventional news feeds – including blog posts, independent write ups, imagery feeds, video logs, short video content and more have become a huge hit. In the near future, we believe that more professionally trained content contributors will establish themselves as ‘We-Media’, a collective term for those who turn themselves into independent media brands. We also estimate that more and more digital content consumers will turn themselves into ‘prosumers’ - consumers who also contribute to the content production, which will also contribute to the increase of digital content creators in India.”

The company also aims to make the UC We-media Programme the top platform for content consumption, creation and services in India and Indonesia. Ye added: “We plan to add more than 30,000 self-publishers, bloggers and key opinion leaders to our platform in 2017, generating over 10,000 articles for UC News, every single day.”