Newsdog is a news aggregator app that is used by more than 50 million readers. It curates content from a list of Indian news sites in 10 local languages.
Tencent funding will direct to add more local languages so it may expand de readership base all around India, as most analysts believe that news curators are about to experience an immense growth in India in the short term.
For example, a study developed by KPMG and Google states that 70 % of Indians trust more regional and vernacular news sites than English-speaking sources. Nonetheless, these projects need to find ways to expand their income and monetize their curating and news aggregating business, the main challenge Tencent will find with its acquisition of Newsdog.
Tencent has an advantage: Newsdog does not mark its first investment in India’s market, so it already knows it quite well.
As data is now cheaper to acquire, and more people are using smartphones, digital content is a wonderful market to attack, because Indians are spending more time on online content.
Tencent can learn from previous Chinese successes in India’s news world, as UCWeb, an app owned by Alibaba –the main Chinese rival of Tencent- that has many years in the Indian market, and ByteDance, that has invested more than 25 million dollars in DailyHunt.