Regional heads to drive monetisation strategy at Twitter-backed ShareChat

In a bid to fast-track its monetisation efforts, social media platform ShareChat has onboarded three senior sales executives to take charge of each zone in the country. Mohalla Tech, the Bengaluru-based company that owns and operates ShareChat, has appointed Satyajit Deb Roy, Satyen Kishan and Debsmita Ghosh as directors.

Roy, who will head the northern and eastern regions, was vice president at music aggregator platform JioSaavn. Kishan, head of the western region, earlier worked with Times Group-owned entertainment platform MXPlayer as national sales head. Ghosh, who is in charge of the southern market, earlier headed sales for social media platform Twitter in the region.

The appointments come after the company announced plans to roll out paid advertisements on its platform from large companies. 

ShareChat’s monetisation strategy is significant in the light of the 12-fold increase in the company’s losses in FY19 to Rs 414 crore, despite a massive growth in revenue. 

The company said it has already implemented more than 20 campaigns for 10 brands including Coca Cola, OYO, Airtel, Pepsi, Future Group and Snapdeal across eight languages. It claims to have over 60 million monthly active users. 

“ShareChat has already developed immense brand confidence and many leading consumer brands have expressed their interest to strategically explore the platform to connect with its audience. This offers an unique proposition to the brands to connect with people in their native language, and drive customised campaigns in one or more languages targeting only the relevant audience,” Sunil Kamath, chief business officer of ShareChat said. 

The company already has a 50-employee strong team to drive the brand solutions, the statement said.

Founded in 2015 by Ankush Sachdeva, Farid Ahsan, and Bhanu Pratap Singh, ShareChat is a social networking platform that allows users to share posts and videos in 15 native languages. ShareChat mainly competes with short video platform TikTok. Both startups faced regulatory action and were directed to take down some of their content last year. 

In August last year, the company raised $100 million in a growth round led by Twitter and Trustbridge Capital, along with SAIF Partners, Shunwei Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among others.