WittyFeed.com, a name heard by many but whose story is yet not been told completely!
WittyFeed holds a history, which is not only interesting but also inspiring. It is a company that has seen times that has caused many startups to die, it has fought and is now truly an example of hard work and dedication with its success.
Mr. Vinay Singhal, founder of WittyFeed.com shares his success with Pixr8 in a recent interview. Taking time out in this festive weekend from his busy schedule, Mr. Singhal did gave plenty of time and attention to celebrating the grand success of Wittyeed.com. He was quick and precise and kept the conversation to the point.
“Currently WittyFeed.com gets 120 Million unique visitors on a month-on-month basis, converting to about 400 Million page views. It makes us world’s 2nd largest viral company after BuzzFeed and India’s largest viral content company. It is the only website form India, ranked under top 75 websites in US.”
Tell us something about yourself and how would you like to link Wittyfeed with your personal life experiences?
I’ve been an entrepreneur since last 6 years and started early in 2010 during the First Year of my Engineering. This is where I met my co-founder Mr. Shashank Vaishnav, who happened to be my classmate! We both were driven by the urge to start something on our own and be our own Boss!
The third co-founder is Mr. Praveen, who happens to be my younger brother. The three of us started together a tech company called Vatsana, that was dedicated to the vision of making people’s life easier.
During the mid-2012, we got exposed to social media and content.
We started a Facebook page called “Amazing Trend in the World” which eventually grew very fast and had 4 million followers in no time! We realized the potential that content and social media had, and hence created a website- WittyFeed.com to not only monetize the available audience but SOLVE A PROBLEM for the social media distributors. Once they entered the industry they realized that this wasn’t an isolated problem. A lot of distribution platforms did not have access to good content. And a lot of writers and curators did not have access to the right kind of seeding platform.
It was important to bring the two together in a self-sufficient sustainable ecosystem. Hence, wittyfeed.com is solving problems for two kinds of people-
- Social media influencers, who help us distribute our content over their Facebook or twitter or any social media group.
- Writers and bloggers, who can easily sign up and unleash their talent to more than 120 million people across the globe.
How does your team curate content?
WittyFeed.com has an available base of 6000 influences on the platform. Hence, the content was very much in demand, which was impossible for us to create on our own! Thereby made WittyFeed.com a platform where any blogger or writer could sign up, write for us and monetize their creations easily.
This motivates the writer to focus only on the writing part and we take care of all of its outreach and monetization parts.
For now, the ratio is 80-20. 80 percent of the content comes from all across the world and the rest 20 percent is done by the in-house writer team. Furthermore, all of the content is carefully filtered and edited by an in-house Editorial Team of the company.
What are some notable examples of experiences that you came across while your journey with the WittyFeed?
“Well, we’ve been bankrupt 8 times for starters”, laughs.
Also from the start, we’ve been in debt too for a many numbers of times! It has been a roller-coaster ride, with several ups and downs!
“The only thing is that it has helped us who we are today. Too much money is a big problem. Innovation ceases to happen that way. We decided whatever will happen, whenever will happen, we’re going hang around and will never give up!”
There’s too much fascination with the money! So, are you thinking about what company is doing or what the company is actually worth?
WittyFeed.com is currently a completely bootstrapped company, which gives a lot of flexibility and freedom to do whatever we want. This has been quite a big factor in touching a mark of 120 M unique visitors in a month. That’s a lot of people to touch, inspire and provide them with your views! Our content is more about making people happy, entertaining them and inspiring them. All this does make a huge social impact and we try to use it wisely and eventually we end up making money as well.
After coming across so many content and news, what is your favorite one?
Every article that goes on the website is unique in its own way, and all of it is my favorite! Well, if I have to be precise I might say that a story about WittyFeed.com, that I wrote, on how to make the content viral, basically, “hacking the virality”, is my favorite.
How is WittyFeed.com doing on a worldwide scale?
WittyFeed.com has become a global brand recently! 35% of our total traffic comes from the US, 15% comes from the UK. A lot of traffic also comes from Canada, Australia and other European countries. . 15% of the traffic comes from India. We are a global brand.
How do you derive your income? From the native so-called advertising or is it the paid content?
Right now there are two models in which we monetize from our business at this stage.
Firstly, we make money through display advertising and secondly, through branded content. We accept branded content, branded stories and help brands to reach out to a better number of audience through our platform.
Finally, how would you like to differentiate yourself from ScoopWhoop and other similar websites?
We are more of an agnostic platform, where so many people are contributing to the group. Our model is more scalable and this eventually differentiates us from other blogging websites. Creating content is a different thing and making it actually viral is a different thing, which we can do more effectively because of our massive influential base. We can feed our content and make sure it actually goes viral!
Message for the budding entrepreneurs?
The only important thing is- never give up! Hang in there and success will come to you.