Alibaba Mobile Business Group-owned company UCWeb’s news app UC News has garnered more than 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) in India and Indonesia. With 100 million daily article views, UC News has rapidly grown in the India and Indonesia markets since its launch in June 2016.
UCWeb is increasing its focus on digital content aggregation and distribution in India, the world’s second-largest internet market.
Talking about the latest milestone, Alibaba Mobile Business Group, president of overseas business, Jack Huang said, “We are experiencing a fast rise in the average time spent on UC News. As of this quarter, an average user spends over 23 minutes on UC News. Users are embracing diverse digital content and their appetite for such content is being met by UC News. Going forward, we are also targeting more diversified and localised content on our platform by end of 2017 to make the local content ecosystem stronger. With over 100 million MAUs, UCWeb envisions itself as powerful as Google and Facebook, and aims to bring the global mobile internet to an era of ‘GUF’ (Google, UCWeb and Facebook).”
Leading the user-generated content ecosystem in India, UC News recently announced We-Media Reward Plan 2.0 for self-publishers, bloggers and independent writers with an initial investment of Rs 50 million. UCWeb is investing Rs 2 billion for driving content distribution in India over the next two years.
With the changing mobile internet landscape, UCWeb has adopted a strategy of becoming a content distribution platform from being a browsing tool by engaging and aggregating diverse form of content on its platforms—UC Browser and UC News.
According to web analytics firm StatCounter, UC Browser now holds the highest browser market share in India. UC Browser is now the most popular browser in India in terms of internet usage across all platforms, with a market share of 43.31%, followed by Chrome’s 36.07% and Opera’s 8.34% share. UC Browser is also the dominant browser for mobile internet in India with over 100 million MOUs (as of September 2016).
According to StatCounter, internet usage in India by desktop and tablet fell from 33.2% in January 2016 to 21% this year. Mobile internet usage jumped from 66.8% to 79% over the same time period.