At the end of this year, the American video-sharing company Triller app decided to officially launch as a ‘splash’ in India. Yet months before the expected launch, in the world’s second-largest internet market, the company has already experienced incredible success.
After Chinese video-sharing app TikTok was barred by the Indian government on June 29 over data privacy concerns, Triller ‘s country user base skyrocketed overnight to over 30 million out of less than a million.
Now, the Los Angeles-based company is going all out to dig its heels deeper in India, and is in talks for a partnership “with a very large company with many arms,” said principal executive Ryan Kavanaugh. The music-centered app, whose investors include rappers Snoop Dogg, Lil Wayne, and Eminem, is also building technology focused on its Indian audience, which it plans to roll out by December.
Upon asked about strategy after TikTok ban, Ryan Kavanaugh told Quartz India, “Unlike TikTok, we don’t like just walking into a market and throwing money and saying we ‘re here. We want to partner in each country with the major companies. We look for feedback on what the best way to work here is for them.
Seven months ago we had a relationship with a very big corporation in India on our radar. This company is big enough for us to know and they’ll direct us in making sure we ‘re behaving like an Indian social media business.
We ‘d set up the technology and infrastructure so we could launch the app’s Indian edition by the end of this year. And we felt we had a big splash to make. We thought we ‘d drive a lot of TikTok users away too. It didn’t mean the app wasn’t available in the app store in India though. This also meant that we were not putting Indian content on the ground and were not recruiting staff.”
On asked about competition from Indian apps such as Mitron & Chingari, ” We ‘re welcoming rivalry. There’s plenty of space in this market which we call social sharing. I don’t think everybody is exactly the same. Each has its own strengths and weaknesses. We believe that everybody can exist. And we’d be a terrific force.”
It will be interesting to see more competition in Indian short video space after the TikTok ban.
