India’s No. 1 Hyperlocal Short News App, Way2News is witnessing a ‘big surge’ in the overall growth charts as it continues to bring trusted and reliable news stories from across the world in short-summarized flip format. The highly rated news app in the last 30 days recorded over 60 percent growth in its Daily Active Users (DAUs) in all eight languages – Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Bangla, Gujarati, Kannada and Malayalam.
Home-bound Indians are increasingly consuming news via apps, especially during the lockdown. In this period, our downloads grew by 150 percent, while the engagement on the app increased by 50 percent. Moreover, the time spent per daily active user is over 24 minutes per person a day.
The strong presence of Way2News in the tier-2 and tier-3 cities is increasing in size. It is adding new users on a daily basis. Strong word of mouth is working miracles. More to it, the app records 70 percent organic traffic every day.
The hyperlocal initiative of Way2News is changing with the times. The app is adding new districts, mandals/talukas and villages to the offering. It is investing its sources in hyperlocal news dissemination. This is where it is standing out. The old and the new users are highly trusting its journalistic standards. The company is continuously working towards maintaining the trust among its users. Talking about its reach, so far, it expanded its presence in 3479 mandals and added 19,000 plus new villages – covering a total of 1,20,000 villages from about 475 districts.
On a daily basis, more than 72 percent of news stories are covered from the hyperlocal geographies. This is a rare feat in the media industry. In terms of screen views, there has been a spike of 67 percent, which means currently the app records 6 billion plus screen views in a month. The number of stories consumed by a user ranges between 110-130 flips in a single day.
A significant rise of 56 percent is recorded in terms of post shares per day. Apart from short news in text format, video content is on the rise on the news platform. Consumption of video increased by 60 percent similar to that of the coverage.
The consumption of news and the numbers are expected to touch news heights in the next few months. The app is focusing more on personalising news stories and providing quality content to its users – both in text and video.