Insights from Glance's billion dollar journey💰
A unicorn in 3 years, here's how Glance is denting the advertising space.
Fact: India has 646 million active Internet users. Consuming content is the primary activity for these users. Plus, native & intuitive content draws multifold engagement.
Enter Glance 🦄
In 3 years of its launch, Glance is already on ~400 million smartphones. Plus, with ~390 Mil raised so far, Glance is destined to rule the mobile advertising market.
Don’t have to download an app.
Don’t even have to open anything.
Everything is served on lock-screen.
Glance is your mobile lock-screen app.
What’s the real product?
Advertising, but it’s nuanced.
Every-time a user swipes on their smartphone lock-screen there is newer content delivered. The content spreads over travel, fun facts, fitness, entertainment, sports, current events & even games that you can play.
This is a brilliant case of native advertising with great content right on the first screen when a user checks their phone. This is sort of super smart, isn’t it?
How did Glance built the distribution?
Glance’s parent company is InMobi. Yes, yes, the advertising behemoth Inmobi. InMobi used existing relationships to build the whole distribution from scratch. Going to the end consumer to download Glance was a costly affair. Plus, considering the advertising revenue per smartphone is limited, the customer acquisition cost would have never made sense.
One masterstroke - OEM manufacturer partnerships.
The cost per install deals with OEM (smartphone manufacturers) such as Samsung, Motorola, Ziaomi, Oppo, realme, vivo brought down the cost to acquire a smartphone user in single digits. Glance is on 400 million smartphones with $0 spends on Google & Facebook.
You must be thinking how is it possible?
The answer is into their content recommendation engine. There are two school’s of opinions. One, most users pass time on the Glance screen. Second, the rest are not able to figure out how to disable Glance, voila !
Glance truly solved for the under 15K price point smartphone users.
It created recommendation engine purely based on time spent / click through at a device level. Add a flavour of 8 local Indian languages to the experience, a recipe to make users spend considerable time with the product.
How are they making big $$$?💰
A ton of insights inside the acquisition Glance did in the last few quarters. Especially with Roposo (the short video platform) it’s bringing creators onto glance. Then it acquired Shop101, a celebrity and influencer-led commerce to further extend its ability to show & sell.
The real money is into revenue share.
With creators onto the Glance platform they bring D2C / FMCG brands to the Bharat audience. With these brands, Glance splitting the revenue into three.
Overall revenue = {advertising} + {% revenue share} + {data sharing with telcos}That’s the Glance story.
Want to know why GrowthX is a feeling?
Watch this story from Rajnish himself. Click on the thumbnail to watch.
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