UCWeb announces investment worth two billion rupees for India, Indonesia market

New Delhi [India], Jan 19 (ANI): UCWeb, a part of Alibaba on Thursday announced its plans to invest two billion rupees (200 million RMB) over the next two years in India and Indonesia market. The funds will primarily be used to tap the huge potential of user-generated content in India via its news distribution and content platform, UC News. UC News, a major product of UCWeb Inc. is a big-data powered content distributor, serving as a one-stop source of trending and curated news content covering all popular categories that Indian users can consume on the go, with featured channels including news, cricket, technology, entertainment, movies, lifestyle, health, humor, etc. Within five months of its launch, UC News became the top app under News Category on Google Play. UCWeb has been setting new trends under the UC We-Media program where people get an opportunity to create, to write, share thoughts and engage with their followers on UC News. The program saw an increase of 184 percent and 348 percent (MoM) in its page views of English and Hindi We-Media content respectively in November 2016. "As India enters the age of increased content consumption through its mobile devices, there is a huge potential for the growth of user-generated content in India similar to what has happened in China. There are more than 600 mn mobile users and 20 mn online content creators in China whereas India currently has 371 mn mobile users with miniscule contribution from self-publishing outlining a huge demand-supply gap," said President Overseas Business Alibaba, Jack Huang. "In view of this changing mobile internet landscape, UCWeb has adopted a strategy of becoming a leading content distribution platform. As such, our flagship product UC Browser has also transformed itself from being the number one mobile browser in India according to StatCounter to a leading content distribution platform in India by integrating with news feeds from UC News," added Jack Huang. Earlier this month, UC News announced a detailed monetary compensation plan in a bid to offer unique content on UC News and further consolidate its position as a content distribution platform. UC News will also help contributors gain traffic, revenue and followers with the help of Big Data technology and smart content distribution system. "With growth in consumption of Information Feeds, non-conventional News Feeds - including blog posts, independent write ups, imagery feeds, videologs, short video content and more have become a huge hit. In the near future, we believe that more professionally trained content contributors will establish themselves as "We-Media", a collective term for those who turn themselves into independent media brands," said GM Overseas Business Alibaba, Kenny Ye. "We also estimate that more and more digital content consumers will turn themselves into "prosumers" - consumers who also contribute to the content production, which will also contribute to the increase of digital content creators in India," added Kenny Ye. (ANI)