UCweb Is Guided By Its Mission To Connect People

Despite India being the world’s second largest internet market after China, a huge majority remains unconnected! But good news is that with increasing smartphone penetration, LTE feature phones and a sharp drop in data cost, the migration to digital connectivity will be swift. Still, issues like slow internet speed and erratic connectivity hamper digital experience. In this scenario, young li, head-international business department, Alibaba mobile business group, explains to Nijhum Rudra how UCweb enhances digital experience and content discovery despite technically constrained environment.

- Nijhum Rudra

What are some of the challenges Indian customers are facing these days when it comes to accessing high-speed internet?

The next wave of growth in India’s internet penetration is expected to come from Tier II and Tier III cities, enabled by wireless mobile internet. The preference of the Indian consumers towards vernacular and regional language content is constantly on the upswing, with 93 per cent of the time spent on videos in Hindi and other regional languages.

But, compared to China, India is still at a nascent stage. There are many challenges and obstacles. Shortage of content creation is the most critical one. According to our data, there are at least 400,000 self-publishers in India already, but content creation is still far less than enough to meet the user demand, especially in the niche categories.

Meanwhile, the content quality is uneven, making it difficult for the users to pick up high-quality articles from thousands of news feeds within their limited time of reading. Third, the traffic distribution is inconsistent as well. Those top media or KOLs take up most of the traffic, while some of the good long-tail contents are not getting the traffic they deserve.

Last and the most important one is the inefficiency in monetization. The traditional methods of monetization majorly depends on the Ad profit sharing, but the truth is that if the traffic is not good enough then there is a very rare chance that a publisher will make the profit they deserve. And even if the traffic is good, the whole transaction chain prevents the writers from making the profit to his/her maximum potential.

How’s your company tackling those pain points and offering state-of- the-art internet services in India?