Dailyhunt, an app for news and e-book invested Rs 15 crore in the local news language portal OneIndia also known as Greynium Information Technologies, owned by Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh. The funding from DailyHunt seen as a revenues sources for advertisement spend on digital with increasing smartphone users.
Dailyhunt and Oneindia already have a content partnership.
Rajesh Jain and BG Mahesh were the brains behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s digital strategy during the 2014 elections and the investment will help Dailyhunt expand its partnership with OneIndia, which is owned by Greynium Information Technologies.
Founded in January 2006, OneIndia websites includes Cricket, FilmiBeat and CareerIndia sections had 35 million unique visitors and 500-million page views a month.
Virendra Gupta, founder & CEO of Dailyhunt said”It’s time for local language content generation to go more deep, like it has in English. We need content in both audio and video, and more short format content appealing to the demographics of the country. We are supporting non-news content with this investment.
Gupta will also join the board of Greynium. OneIndia was initially funded by Jain, who sold his portal India-World to Sify for Rs 499 crore during the dotcom bubble in 2000. He acquired the company in 2010 through his company Netcore.
“Greynium has been a key player in the local languages space, and this position will be further strengthened by Dailyhunt’s reach across India.
“It is estimated that 56 per cent of Indians showed preferences for video downloads with 85 per cent viewers consuming short form video content (under 10 minutes) on smartphones as against 71 per cent on laptops. (Source)