We Want To Be The Largest Indic Language Platform

Daily hunt president Umang Bedi on his company’s efforts to capitalise on the growth in the number of local language consumers of the Internet in India.

- Abhik Sen

NEWS AND CONTENT AGGREGATOR DAILYHUNT’S user base has doubled to 145 million people from six months ago, says president Umang Bedi. He says Dailyhunt is looking to become the largest Indic language platform with the number of local language consumers of the Internet expected to grow to 600 million in the next three years from 235 million now. Dailyhunt’s app, which provides news articles in 15 languages, has seen 160 million installations. In an interview with Fortune India, the 41-year-old spoke about the challenges facing news aggregators amid rising concerns over the proliferation of fake news, and the competition for the customer’s time and attention. Edited excerpts:

With proliferation of fake news, has the market become challenging for news aggregators? How do you separate the real from the fake?

I have worked for a social media platform [Facebook India]. Social media platforms are often used to disseminate fake news to wider audiences and they are often blamed for it. It is unfortunate because they’re not always the originators of this kind of content. This originates from two sources: malicious individuals or from very low-end local publishers. There are lots of apps, including Chinese apps, that are infiltrating the market that work on an open platform to let anybody and everybody write news.