Worth More Than A Glance

Six months ago, InMobi launched its lock screen content service Glance with an eye on rising content consumption through mobiles in India. Turns out it was a good call.

- Deepti Chaudhary

WHEN INMOBI, a provider of cloud-based mobile platforms for enterprise marketers, was developing its content service Glance, the one thing it wanted to do was stand out from the crowd. “Given the glut of apps out there in the world, we felt that if there was a way for us to summarise and personalise all the content from inside all the apps and bring them onto the screen... then that’s a great service we are doing,” says Naveen Tewari, founder and CEO of InMobi.

After three years of mulling, InMobi, the country’s first unicorn, zeroed in on lock screens of smartphones to display content. It also decided Glance, which provides news snippets and videos, would not run ads—a strange decision for a mobile advertising firm. “If you run ads on this [lock screen], business is dead before arrival,” says Tewari.

It has proved a smart move. Since its launch six months ago, Glance has 26 million daily active users. It is glanced 81 million times a month; users spend an average of 22 minutes a day on it. Users can turn off Glance, but 85% don’t.