YouTube and WhatsApp inch closer to half a billion users in India

It was through Whatsapp that India had developed a scale of connection that no other app had yet achieved. By mid-2019, Facebook’s native app was close behind, with more than 400 million population-specific users in the country. The closest app to Whatsapp in India back then was YouTube, which, according to data it provided for its own advertising offerings and also for the mobile insight company App Annie, had just about 260 million users in the country around the same time.

Things have changed dramatically since then.

Courtesy YouTubeIndustry insiders say that 425 million people used their Android phones or tablets on a monthly basis in India (Android’s share of the smartphone market in India is 97 per cent), the number quoted in the article by ProWellTech which reproduced the data supplied by an industry manager. For WhatsApp, that number was 422 million monthly active users on Android in India last month.

Considering how well these two apps have been received on the iOS devices, WhatsApp leads the pack in India with 459 million active users1, while YouTube runs a close second with 452 million users.

Once China closed its door to US tech giants, India was the next target as the fastest growing and largest market for Silicon Valley and Chinese growth companies alike over the same decade. With under 50 million internet users in 2010, the decade ended with over 600 million. Google and Facebook did their fair share.

In the past four years, Google and Facebook have both been investing in helping people in India – a country of nearly 1.4 billion people – to access the internet offline. Google started a programme to provide WiFi at 400 train stations in the country. It hoped to expand its programme to other public spaces. Facebook, too, launched Free Basics in India (and after it was banned in the country, launched Express Wi-Fi).

Even Google and Facebook, where India is the biggest user base, have reined in their connectivity work in recent years in the wake of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, announcing that he would bring the rest of the country online. After large investments by both those companies in his Jio Platforms company, the world’s largest publicly listed telecom company, with more than 400 million subscribers, there didn’t appear to be much market left for them.

For hundreds of millions of people in India, where much of the world’s online user base was previously overly cognisant of how much each minute of their time spent on the internet cost, Jio Platforms’ mobile data tariff was practically unlimited and worry-free. Hours of YouTube and other short-video-focused platforms over the past five years. That growth could explain why Google is doubling the number of video shorts apps.

The new numbers from ProWellTech reveal several other interesting things about the Indian marketplace. And even if WhatsApp’s pace of growth has slowed, in India it continues to enjoy unparalleled loyalty of its users.

More than 95 per cent of monthly active WhatsApp users in India are daily active WhatsApp users, and close to 100 per cent check the app at least once a week. By comparison, exactly 75 per cent of the same users that are monthly active on YouTube are concurrently daily active YouTube users.

The data reveal that Google’s eponymous app, and Chrome – like YouTube – come pre-installed4 on most Android smartphones – has also crossed over 400 million monthly active users in India in recent months. For reference, the Facebook app recorded around 325 million MAUs (monthly active users) in India last month.

When I sought a response, a spokesperson for Google noted a Comscore report from last year that said: YouTube’s reach in India was 325 million unique users per month as of the month of May 2020 [sic].

Meanwhile, in a separate report this week, the research firm Media Partners Asia estimated that YouTube contributed 43 per cent of sales in India’s online video market last year ($ 1.4 billion). Disney + Hotstar took a 16 per cent share, and Netflix 14 per cent.

1: In the interests of simplicity, I did not take into account the traction of the WhatsApp Business and YouTube Kids apps in India Issues that apply to WhatsApp including YouTube are also applicable in their apps that run on the KaiOS that supports phones in JioPhone in India. (More than 40 million such phones were shipped in India last count. ProWellTech could not find out how the app was doing on this platform.) The overlapping numbers of Google’s Android and YouTube’s numbers on Android (phones, tablets) and iOS (iPhone, iPad) is something that the company cannot separate. WhatsApp’s numbers will also include usage on a phone but the overlap with phones and apps will not be the same as in the case of YouTube. Here’s why. If it goes into my phone, I have a WhatsApp account tied up with a phone number. If I want to use WhatsApp with that number on a different phone, I will have to stop using it on one phone first. So if I have it on an iPhone with a primary number I cannot use it with the same number on Android. At least, not at the same time.

2 WhatsApp Business is also gaining momentum: it already has more than 50 million users in India. There, again, some of the misgivings of No 1 are relevant.

3) Users still have to deal with them, and only after they do so will the app – whether it’s the original App Annie or some other Mobile Insight company – be able to declare itself ‘active’. In comparison with Apple, the pre-installation of the Google app is unprecedented. The Google apps still have to persuade users.