Inshorts – Technology Gap Analysis

Industry analysis :
Technologies used by media industry:
1. Chatbots
2. Virtual Reality
3. Anti-ad blocking
4. Automated Jouralism
5. Social outreach app
6. Data Journalism/visualization
7. Live Video platform
8. Text-to-video creation
Sources of revenue in digital media:

Membership

Advertising Sponsorships

Sources
Repackage Content
and sell data Marketing

Direct Sale
Events
of products

Usage of AI in News Industry:

1. Streamlining media workflows: AI enables journalists to focus on what they do best

2. Automating mundane tasks: An application such as Reuter’s News Tracer can track down breaking
news, so that journalists are not tied down to grunt work.
3. Crunching more data: Research can be performed much faster
4. Digging out media insights: Information can be correlated quickly and efficiently.
5. Eliminating fake news: Fact checking is speedy and reliable. Facebook is using AI to detect word
patterns that may indicate a fake news story.
6. Generating outputs: Machines can put together reports and stories from raw data

Benefits of Digital Media

 1. It can be searched comprehensively, quickly and reliably.
2. An e-newspaper has the form of a webpage or mobile application and can be accessed with
perosnal computers and mobile devices like a tablet or a smartphone or e-reader (Spil &
Suijkerbuijk, 2015)
3. Socialize (share and discuss) and education
4. Multimedia, hyperlinks
5. No need to fit content from multiple sources with newspaper image
6. No need to partner with central seller
7. Little printing/distribution costs

Disadvantages of Digital Media

1. Small screens
2. Internet too slow
3. Different layout
4. People who cut out articles are at loss
5. Extra editing (bloggers, reader content)
6. Maintaining servers, application, website, and security or outsource

Why was there a need for an app like inshorts?

 Average human attention span of human being is just 8 seconds, according to a survey by
Microsoft. This is like a threat to long-form journalism.

 In this fast-moving world, people don’t have the time to read newspapers and full-page articles.
Something shorter was needed to make sure people are updated with news.

Inshorts (News in Shorts)

Inshorts is a news app that selects latest and best news from multiple national and international sources and
summarises them to short and crisp sixty words or less format, in English or Hindi.

History of Inshorts

Three IIT Classmates Azhar Iqubal, Anunay Pandey, and Deepit Purkayastha created a Facebook page in
March 2013 with the name of News in Shorts. They posted summarized news story on this page. The
page got well-liked among the students and generated interest among the individuals. Few days later
they joined Times Internet-backed TLabs startup accelerator.The company launched its Android App in
2013 and ios app in 2015. In 2015, News In Shorts rebranded to Inshorts as they didn’t want to
limit themselves to simply news and needed to explore Infographics, videos and blogs.

Inshorts Funding:

Series A:
In February 2015 Series A funding for the company closed with $4 million being led by Tiger Global,
Rebright Partners, and Flipkart Founders Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal.
Series B:
Series B Round of funding closed in same year and closed at 20 million dollars led by existing investor Tiger
Global.

Acquisitions:

Betaglide is a web based analytics company. They created Retention.ai which tracks the uninstallation of
apps. Inshorts acquired Betaglide in 2015 and uses this technology for analysing the user behavious. It
tracks users who uninstalled and finds out possible reasons for uninstallation, this results in decreasing
user acquisition cost.

InShorts Business Model:

The business model of Inshorts is very simple. Their main aim is to get users spend five minutes on the
app daily. Inshorts targets its more than 4 million subscriber through push notifications in the app.
In less than 60 words, the app tells the subscribers the most significant details of the latest news. The
content is linked to the whole story for people who want to read the whole story. Inshorts targets people
who don’t want to read the whole news stories but want to know only the highlights.

Inshorts is free for users. It monetises through B2B channels through advertising. Brands sign up for ads
and sponsored content together through annual contracts, and pay on the basis of impressions (views)
and engagements (likes and shares).

Inshorts is working with almost 100 advertisers including Vodafone, Oneplus, Mercedes, and Myntra.

Inshorts Revenue Model:

Inshorts is generating revenue in two ways:

 Branded Content: The content is pushed below a popular story, so users discover it like a
regular ad. The company partnered with popular brands like Zomato and Amazon to push
their content.
  Traffic Generation: Inshorts has an agreement with a few media houses. So, for every click to
the website Inshorts gets a commission.

Various other innovations are:

• Premier ads: In-shorts uses branded content into the Newsfeed along with news.
Customized brand-centric image used for advertisements to attract users. The advertisers
can include video or image in the ads.

• Poll Story: This format engages user while they are reading about the brand. Brands get
real-time user feedback on any product launch through this format and can use the
results.

• Notification: In this format, data-driven insights are used to engage users passive brand
building along with the integration of branded content into the news feed and customized
brand-centric image to attract users.

• Vertical Video: A full-screen video ad in which the ad will be seen in portrait mode. This
format is used by few app developers like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Inshorts is
the first news app to launch a vertical video ad format.

• Video + text (2:1) format: A format where 2/3rd of the screen will contain text/image and
the rest will have a video.

• Bumper Video: A six-second ad format which is gaining popularity amongst the

advertisers and experiences better engagement with the app users instead of a long-form
ad.
• Digital Magazines are creatives through which brands communicate with users through
gifs, videos, and polls to keep the audience engaged by creating curiosity and allowing the
readers to flip through the pages to provide information about a product
• Interstitial Banners - Full-screen rich media branding slot where HD Creative, GIF, HTML,
Video can be used as a part of the native experience of the app, keep the user experience
non-intrusive.
• Fact Cards - This consists of a set of interesting facts about a Brand, Industry (Eg: Auto) or
a day (Eg: Women’s Day). The property is highly engaging and the cards get shared on
social media very often.

Competitors

DailyHunt

Dailyhunt is Inshorts's #1 rival. Dailyhunt was founded in 2007 in Bangalore, Karnataka. Like Inshorts,
Dailyhunt also operates in the Publishing space. Dailyhunt generates $13.9M more revenue than Inshorts.

ViralShots
ViralShots is one of Inshorts's top competitors. ViralShots is headquartered in Gurgaon, Haryana, and
was founded in 2015. Like Inshorts, ViralShots also works within the Publishing sector. ViralShots
generates 95% the revenue of Inshorts.

The Times of India

The Times Of India is seen as one of Inshorts's top competitors. The Times Of India was founded in 1838,
and its headquarters is in Mumbai, Maharashtra. Like Inshorts, The Times Of India also works within the
Publishing sector. The Times Of India has 9 fewer employees than Inshorts.

Inshorts So Far:

Inshorts has around four million downloads. It is rated 4.6 on Google Play, the highest among all news
apps across play stores globally. It has the third largest android market share in terms of number of active
users in India, after The Times of India and NewsHunt.

AI-based news summarization

Inshorts has introduced artificial intelligence-based news summarization on its app. Rapid60 algorithm
can automatically summarize a full length article into 60 words brief along with a headline and an
image.This will help the company to scale up the number of articles published on its platform from 10,000
per month to 1 lakh per month.
Rapid60 algorithm has been trained based on a database of more than half a million articles that have
been summarized by Inshorts editors over the past five years. Although Rapid60 has been working for
more than a year, the top read storied on the app are still manually written since they need extreme
attention. Inshorts CTO Anunay Arunav says before using Rapid60, a lot of pilots were run to achieve
decent level of accuracy.

Digital Magazines- To change the scenario of Brand Storytelling

New advertisement format launched by Inshorts – the Digital Magazine. By innovating Ad formats like
Fact Cards, HTML Ads, Inshorts has created a unique format of advertising.

Creative content these days cannot be restricted to only text and images these days. So, the new
advertisement format introduced by Inshorts is an opportunity to connect with the audience in an
innovative style. The Digital Magazines will include gifs, videos and polls to engage the audience. The
millennials can share the entire digital magazine on their social media feed or via Whatsapps. Digital
Magazine targets that the users themselves engage with the advertiser’s brand story.

Interactive content, low cost of production and distribution, digital magazines are progressively catching
the eyes of the marketers and advertisers. Netflix has achieved 3x more engagement as compared to text
ads for ‘The Umbrella Academy’ using the digital magazines within 2 weeks of the release of the series.
Inshorts had partnered with Netflix for Narcos and Cadbury.
Latest innovations in advertisement technology

Inshorts is trying to go ahead with the HTML5 concept for advertisements. There are only a few ad
agencies that make the HTML5 advertisements. The HTML5 ads will make the ad more interactive due to
its dynamism. Not all the publishers use HTML5 advertisements and those accepting are third parties. The
publishers use different technology and those third-party agencies don’t have their own reach. Inshorts
is technologically very advanced and has a good team of creative designers and technology at the backend.
It started creating its own HTML5 ads.

Technology used by inshorts

Products used
Inshorts uses technology products and services including Google Analytics, Vimeo, and G Suite

Website Tech Stack

Inshorts is actively using 4 technologies for its website. These include SPF, Google Apps for
Business, and Microsoft Azure DNS

Retention.ai

• Identify users who uninstalled and understand their behavior

• Measure each campaign and channel efficiency and reduce user acquisition cost
• Powerful audience segmentation that works on existing as well as users who uninstalled the app
• Define user personas based on other apps installed on the device
• Identify users who use competing apps and proactively engage them

Google Analytics

• Get to know your audience

• Measure the success of marketing campaigns
• Customise your website

Recommendations

We recommend inshorts to use Hadoop along with hive for data scalability, faster processing and handling
large amounts of data. Inshorts can also start using MongoDB. Using MongoDB the database can be used
for all types of devices. MongoDB is a No-SQL database, so Inshorts will also be able to handle structured,
unstructured and semi-structured data efficiently.

Advantages of using MongoDB for Inshorts

 Killer Apps. MongoDB's flexible data model and rich query functionality let your teams build killer
apps. MongoDB can manage any kind of data, no matter how often it changes. Any feature. Any
data. Any device.
  Millions of Users. MongoDB was built to scale horizontally, in your data center or in the cloud.
Serve millions of users and petabytes of data without complex hardware or extra software. This
shouldn’t be hard, and with MongoDB, it isn’t.
 Faster. Your teams move faster with MongoDB because its dynamic schemas let them iterate.
They spend less time on the database, and more time on the app. When you measure time in
weeks, you can adapt.
 Dynamic Schemas. Schemas in MongoDB are self-describing. Pull in new user data, support new
devices or sensors, and build new features without schema redesigns and migrations. Your teams
can work in sprints, iterating on the schema early and often.
 Horizontal Scalability. In MongoDB, scaling out is native to the database using a technique called
sharding. With multiple options for scaling – including range-based, hash-based and zones
sharding – MongoDB can support thousands of nodes, petabytes of data and hundreds of
thousands of ops per second, without requiring you to build custom partitioning and caching
layers.

Advantages of using Hadoop and Hive in Inshorts

 Hadoop runs a job that is executed on a scheduled basis, then creates another database that a
mobile application can query. The result is a smaller database and an organization of information
suitable to mobile response time requirements.
 Hadoop's power lies in its ability to perform a series of difficult tasks on specific types of data at
certain volume levels and distributability.
 It's uniquely good at scheduled tasks that run at most daily, and are aimed at data that is
unstructured or semistructured, but whose information can be represented as a series of
traditional databases that are effectively abstractions of the raw data.
 Hive is an Apache project that automates the process of converting queries from traditional SQL
sources into something Hadoop can work with. The data warehouse system creates additional
indexes and provides tools for real-time Hadoop access.

References

http://newsentrepreneurs.blogspot.com/2014/05/11-revenue-sources-for-digital-news.html
https://emerj.com/ai-sector-overviews/automated-journalism-applications/
https://www.wibbitz.com/blog/examples-of-emerging-technologies-revolutionizing-media-industry/
https://www.whizsky.com/2017/09/case-study-inshorts-number-one-news-app/
https://tech.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/startups/inshorts-debuts-ai-based-news-
summarization-on-its-app/64531038
https://www.itvoice.in/inshorts-launches-digital-magazines-aims-to-change-the-scenario-of-brand-
storytelling
https://www.exchange4media.com/marketing-news/we-make-news-reading-more-convenient-tarun-
arora-inshorts-95555.html