Is Koo the alternative to Twitter it claims to be?

Raising tough questions to twitter over the suspension of its official account, an Indian microblogging platform Koo has declared itself to be the best competitor of Twitter. On December 16, Twitter suspended the official twitter handle of Koo which was set up to answer the queries of its users. In an answer to this suspension, Koo’s co-founder Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka took on twitter and went on to proclaimed itself to be the best alternative to Twitter. Radhakrishna, through his tweet said that one of the twitter handles of Koo got banned. He further went on questioning Twitter over its free speech policy. Twitter was almost blamed to be upset for silencing, the only and best alternative of Twitter, as the tweet suggested.

Having seen the gaps in the social media, Radhakrishna and Bidawatka, two and a half years back came up with the idea of launching this microblogging site called, Koo. It was launched to provide voice to the people with language barriers so far as the English language is concerned. In addition to this, Koo has also served voice to the English speakers. One of the major advantages of this platform is that it has automatic translation into multiple languages.

To elaborate the present data of the number of users, about 60% are Hindi users, 20% are vernacular languages and 20% are English language users. However, the exact numbers were not revealed by the company. Radhakrishna stated that Koo is built to take advantage of geographies where Twitter does not have much impact.

Koo has been tremendously successful since it was launched and has more than 60 million downloads as of 2020. In its aspiration to conquer the space abroad, Koo has initially expanded to Brazil, in over 48 hours it saw one million dollars as the founders claim. Though, it has not reached the monetization stage yet Koo is ambitious about taking it to the United States.

Former Twitter India head, Manish Maheshwari said that Koo could be considered a replacement of Twitter if they manage to grow aggressively outside India. They would have an over Twitter in the Spanish audience in the United States because it has majority of Non-English speakers.

The prime focus of the company is on taking capturing the markets, delaying the monetisation for a year or two. Koo has raised $50 million from the investors such as Accel Partners, Tiger Global, 3one4 Capital, Kalaari Capital and Blume Ventures. And the experimentation over advertising in India is going on by working with the greatest of the brands like Star Sports, Amazon Prime Video and Myntra.

They have 50 advertisers for the company already. The supreme traction that they expect to get is because there is a safety concern policy that they operate with, 95% of the users are genuine because the users have to register using phone number and self-verification is done through Adhaar. Free-verification, higher character limit and multiple profile photo feature adds value to its subscription.

Radhakrishna claims Koo to be the largest amongst all other microblogging platforms across the world such as, Gettr, Truth Social, Mastodon, Parler and Gab. Koo is however above-board in saying that they do share the user-data with advertisers with a purpose of showing personalised advertisements.

There are hindrances when it comes to going global, while experimenting with Brazil markets they faced moderation and security issues. Such as fake profiles of personalities on Koo, but the company overcame them on its toes. It was strenuous to comply with European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Koo had been adjudged along with a prominent social app YourQuote as second-best while Chingari had won the contest.

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John S Wilson

John S Wilson is a Journalist at Entrepreneur Ethics.

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