Pratilipi, vernacular storytelling platform has recorded an upsurge in readership of its content in 2020 with monthly active users of 20 million. The company took 5 months to reach the 20 million mark from 10 million. Ranjeet Pratap Singh, CEO of Pratilipi tweeted that the firm took 5 years to reach 10 million users and 5 months to reach next 10.
“We have consistently grown about 50% quarter on quarter, it is just that the base is bigger. The new addition looks much bigger as well. The 20 million MAU is for Pratilipi’s core product including Web, Android and iOS. However, it doesn’t include new products Pratilipi Comics and Pratilipi FM,” Singh said in a statement.
The self-publishing platform presently has about 2 million daily active users for its core product. The lockdown helped the company to grow but not that significantly as they only saw an additional increase of 20-25% in readers and writers. Though the average time spent by the users have increased in this duration.
Singh said, “Pratilipi is primarily known for fiction and literature which are about 70% of our total content and 80% of the readership. While maximum traction and engagement come from Hindi, Marathi, Bengali and Malayalam are the next three languages on Pratilipi.”
Pratilipi was founded by Singh, Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Rahul Ranjan, Sahradayi Modi and Prashant Gupta five years ago and is presently available in 12 languages. The firm has over 200K writers, 10.7 million readers and 200K stories on its app. It has also raised over $30 million from a bunch of investors including Tencent.
Pratilipi competes with the likes of ShareChat, Helo, YourQuote and Matrubharti. The consistent growth of Pratilipi shows that vernacular writing and reading have been catching on among Internet users across India’s smaller cities and rural areas.