SNAP INC. ANNOUNCES REACHING 100 MILLION SNAPCHATTERS IN INDIA

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~At “Snap in India 2021” event, Snap Inc. commits to India-focused investments to further strengthen localised experiences for Snapchatters, Creators and Partners~   

National, October 27, 2021 (GNI): Snap Inc. today virtually hosted the second edition of “Snap in India” to celebrate Snap’s growing community of Indian partners, creators, brands, storytellers and Snapchatters.  

At the event, Snap Co-Founder and CEO Evan Spiegel announced the milestone of reaching 100 million Snapchatters monthly in India, and overviewed the consistent localisation efforts and innovations driven by the Snap team in India

“We have made significant investments to localize the Snapchat experience for the Indian community. We have added culturally relevant content, developed highly active and creative local creator communities, and invested in local products, marketing initiatives, and language support,” said Evan Spiegel.

“Following these efforts to bring a localized experience to Indian Snapchatters, we now reach 100 million Snapchatters monthly in India. We will continue to anchor our efforts around celebrating local culture and talent, while empowering, growing, and providing resources for our community of Indian creators.”

Bobby Murphy, Snap Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, highlighted the importance of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences on Snapchat that have helped the company engage with partners, creators, and Snapchatters around the country:

“Augmented reality is at the core of Snapchat’s offerings in India. Our efforts to stay culturally relevant and offer unique AR experiences have resonated with 100 million Indian Snapchatters. We have worked towards empowering students and youth with essential AR Skills through workshops and lensathons,” said Bobby Murphy. “We aim to partner with more local creators in India to grow the number of incredible experiences available to Snapchatters. At Snap, our intent is to make AR more accessible, useful and practical than ever before,” stated in the press release.

KEY HIGHLIGHTS FROM SNAP IN INDIA 2021

BUILDING STRATEGIC BRAND PARTNERSHIPS

Snap’s partners have played an instrumental role in developing localised experiences for India.

Snap announced a strategic partnership with India’s homegrown e-commerce marketplace, Flipkart, to develop innovative AR experiences for eCommerce. This will be an India-first eCommerce partnership for Snap, and Snap’s Camera Kit will be an integral part of Flipkart’s “Camera Storefront”. Through this partnership, shoppers will be able to begin their shopping and eCommerce engagement journey through Snapchat  AR, making the process easy from the comfort of their homes!

Snap is enabling virtual try-ons for Snapchatters, as Sugar Cosmetics and MyGlamm have adopted Snap’s AR shopping beta program to offer virtual beauty and makeup try-on experiences to consumers.

Samsung Mobile launched a unique “Fun Mode” feature to bring some of Snap’s AR-powered Lenses to their native camera app, and extended this partnership locally with their “Made in India” M Series smartphones.       

India is now the first and only market where Snapchat has distribution partnerships with all the top Android OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers), which total over 100 million devices in India. By pre-installing Snapchat on devices, Snap reduces friction for on-boarding new Snapchatters, encouraging them to try the app as an engaging new way to visually communicate with their friends.

Snap Map, which serves as a personal map to each Snapchatter’s surroundings, connecting people and places, has entered into a partnership with Zomato. This is the first Snap Map partnership in India, and Snapchatters will have access to restaurant information and be able to place food orders right from their personal Map on Snapchat.

Snap will launch a free, early-stage founder focused program in India: Yellow Tree Bootcamp. This willserve as an intersection of creativity and technology, bringing together experts from Snap and the Indian startup community to discuss fundraising, operations, growth, including how to leverage tools like Snap Kit and Snapchat Ads Manager to grow.

India is the second largest and fastest growing market for Bitmoji, Snap’s personalized emoji app,withthe Bitmoji library constantly evolving in India with new localized content. The Bitmoji “Holi Hai” filter was the #1 Snapchat geofilter in India during Holi in 2021. 

Select OnePlus devices, including the OnePlus 9R, includes a Bitmoji “always-on display” feature that helps liven up the ambient display with the user’s personal Bitmoji avatar. Josh, a leading Indian short video app, enables users to add Bitmoji stickers to videos, use Bitmojis as profile pictures and in the comments section to express themselves.

CONTENT PARTNERSHIPS

Snap has curated made-for-mobile shows with a commitment to offer entertaining, local content.

Snap launched the localized Hinglish version of one of the most popular Snap Originals ‘Phone Swap’ that has been watched by 16 million Snapchatters since its launch^[1] and is one of the most-watched shows in India.

Snap also released a slate of Creator Shows, including What’s On My Plate feat. Anushka Sen and Vir Das’ and The Most Epic Max Show, and a combined 16 million viewers have watched both the shows!^[2]

Snap has steadily increased offerings of local content to the Indian community through partnerships with leading channels. Today, Snapchat’s “Discover” content section has 70 local Indian channels^[3] across news, fitness, fashion, entertainment and comedy, publishing premium content on Snap in 2021 — more than 200% over Q2 of 2020.^[4]

This has led to total daily time spent by Snapchatters in India watching Shows and publisher content increasing by 150% year-over-year (Q2 ‘21 vs. Q2 ‘20)^[5], with over 125 million unique viewers having watched a show in India on Snapchat.^[6]

To strengthen its commitment to offer relevant content to Indian Snapchatters, Snap is doubling down on Original series in India with fresh, original, exclusive, local content to watch and enjoy, and has commissioned over 120 episodes of new content for 2022! ^[7]

Snap has also partnered with some of India’s leading entertainment channels, including Sony Entertainment Television and Zee TV, to offer curated content that is popular amongst Indians.

Snap will present two new seasons of “Phone Swap India” — featuring new surprise celebrity guests!  And to continue investment in the creator community, Snapchat will launch exclusive Creator Shows featuring top creatorsShehnaaz Gill, Avneet Kaur, Harsh Beniwal and Sushant Divgikar.

Viewers will also be able to enjoy entertaining content from popular creators – Ruhi Singh, Adnan Shaikh, Samiksha Sood, and Vishal Panday, whose series ‘Retro Rewind’ premieres on Snapchat today, starting 27th October.

AUGMENTED REALITY AND DIGITAL UPSKILLING 

The Snapchat Camera links the digital and physical worlds, bringing together the creativity and utility of computing and the remarkable world around us through the power of Augmented Reality.

To celebrate the diversity and festive spirit in India, Snap created festive AR Lenses for 75 local festivals^[8], andintroduced over 350 hyperlocal geofilters across cities^[9] tohelp Snapchatters engage with their communities at a hyperlocal level.

To celebrate Independence Day this year, Snap brought the India Gate to life with the third Landmarker Lens in India — after the Taj Mahal and the iconic Gateway of India.

Snap is committed to democratizing the ability to use and create augmented reality, and Snap’s Lens Studio is a powerful, accessible to all application that helps people create AR experiences. Local Lens Studio workshops have helped students to create shared experiences and express their ideas in compelling ways.

Snap has conducted Lens Studio workshops to teach AR to over 5000 students^[10] from different schools and colleges across India including IIT & SIES – Mumbai, NIFT – Hyderabad, Pearl Academy – Delhi, Krishna Public School – Raipur, Punjab Engineering College, Christ University – Bangalore and more.

Snap also partnered with Navjyoti India Foundation and leading skill acceleration platform Skillenza to host a special Lens Studio workshop for International Women’s Day earlier this year. This introduced young women from across the country to augmented reality and other emerging digital skill sets.

GROWTH & MONETISATION

Snap India has been rapidly expanding its monetisation capabilities to cater to businesses of all shapes and sizes, and now Snap serves a wide variety of advertiser objectives across the marketing funnel.

Snap has also assembled best-in-class measurement tools to help advertisers track key metrics spanning conversions, to purchases, to sign-ups.

All of these have helped Snap in India see an increase of net new advertisers by 70% in 2020^[11], from sectors including FMCG, eCommerce, Entertainment, Video streaming, Mobile wallets, Tech OEM’s and more. In the past year, Snap worked with ITC Yippee Noodles, Intel Evo, LG, OnePlus, Spotify, Swiggy, and more.

SNAP GAMES

Games have redefined how Snapchatters connect on the app resulting in more exciting shared experiences.

In a collaboration with Mojiworks for one of Snap’s most popular games – ‘Ready Chef Go!’ – Snap introduced a localised challenge called ‘Dosa Dash.’ This introduction of ‘Dosa Dash’ to ‘Ready Chef Go’ led to twice the number of players, matches, and overall engagement in India. With this success, Snap will be partnering further with Mojiworks to implement India-themed trivia in their second hit game, ‘Trivia Party’.

Snap also partnered with Moonfrog Labs to launch Ludo Cub, which in six months has been played by over 27 million Snapchatters, with nearly 30% of them coming from India. Snap will now introduce ‘Carrom,’ another classic multi-platform social board popular amongst Indians.

EMPOWERING INDIA’S CREATOR COMMUNITY

Snap is focused on growing the community of creators in India, and has introduced features like Gifting and the Creator Marketplace to empower them.

With the launch of Spotlight, Snap empowered a new generation of creators to make their way to center stage, with their passions and talents on full display. Since its launch in India in March 2021, the daily Spotlight story view time has quadrupled^[12]. Innovating and improving Spotlight continues to be a focus with addition of new features like the Trending Page.

Beyond Spotlight, emerging and established Creators are thriving on Snapchat and meaningfully growing their audiences as they connect with fans through Public Stories, Shows and Snap Originals on Discover. The Indian Snap Star community has grown extensively with 300 Snap Stars since 2020.^[13] Indian creators have an opportunity to syndicate their existing shows on Discover, giving their content a new audience via Snapchat.

Snap Stars in India now have access to Gifting, a new monetisation opportunity which will allow Snap Stars to receive a share of the revenue from Gifts they receive from their fans through Story Replies.

Snap also recently launched Creator Marketplace, which allows brands to connect with creators directly and pay them to produce branded content with 100% of the transaction going to the creator. AR Lens Creators in India are currently participating, and it will be rolling out to Snap Stars in India soon.

From Spotlight to Discover, to Gifting and the Creator Marketplace, Creators in India have actively used new offerings to use Snap’s content and product offerings to establish deeper connections with fans.ends