What is Koo?
Koo is an Indian microblogging and social networking service, owned by Bangalore-based Bombinate Technologies. It was co-founded by entrepreneurs Aprameya Radhakrishna and Mayank Bidawatka. The app was launched in early 2020; it won the government’s Atmanirbhar App Innovation Challenge which selected the best apps from some 7,000 entries across the country.
It is a micro-blogging platform based in India, which first burst into popularity in early 2020, when the Indian Government and twitter were at a standoff over twitter’s refusal to block accounts during the Farmer’s protest. It attracted a lot of Indians to use it and many celebrities, ministers and other politicians also joined it. This also pushed the masses to join and millions of people flocked to the site.
It has raised $65 million USD to this date and bagged numerous awards. To learn more about it in detail, I recommend reading the Wikipedia page of the platform as it gives a good background to it.
The fall and maybe a little bit of deceit*
The initial boost of users was not sustained and slowly but surely the number of users has steadily declined over the past few years.
This is where I come in, I was looking to join some social media platforms other than the big ones and being from India, I had heard of koo from the newspaper articles. The app claimed to have 3.2 million monthly active users the as of April 2023[1].
When I went to check the site, it did not feel like there where as many people as described using it actively. It feels like most users are either bots or spammers or people whoever told to install the app through a social media seminar.
There is a community on the website but surely not as big as they claim. I did a little bit of data searching regarding the number of users on the site. For this I used http://similarweb.com. From what I can tell the number of monthly active visitors is significantly less than that of mastodon.social, which is the biggest mastodon instance.
I know similarweb.com isn’t the most accurate site, but from the reviews it looked reliable enough and the data for my on websites was pretty much in line.
I dug a bit deeper. I found through a recent article that it has less than 1 million users on its app according to Sensor Tower [2].
This is where my spidy senses have really started to tingle about it. mastodon.social, I have started to use it and while it doesn’t have more than 300,000 monthly active users, feels significantly more lively even on its local feed. There are a lot of important people on the platform that regularly post, but those are mostly posts managed by their social media teams, what they post on twitter, might as well post on koo.
I am not sure if the number of users they claim to have is true or not, but looking at the platform, that number of monthly active users seems to be over-inflated, at least to me.
koo is now looking for more funding or to be acquired now, I don’t know if they will be successful but I can say one thing for sure, this is about a quote from its co-founder, I came across:
With just 6 months more on our trajectory, we would have beaten Twitter in India
- Mayank Bidawatka [3]
Even if you gave them more than the amount they are asking for, this is not possible. This platform has been on a downward trajectory for a very long time and it will remain so. The amount they raised could have easily sustained a simple micro-blogging site, which they are with millions of users for at least 3-4 more years.
I don’t know where they spent their money, but even if they are acquired, I don’t see them ever coming close to even mastodon, not to speak of twitter.
References
- Moneycontrol. (2023). Microblogging website Koo continues to see declining active users. [online] Available at: https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/microblogging-website-koo-continues-to-see-declining-active-users-10838291.html [Accessed 26 Sep. 2023].
- Yahoo Life. (2023). Koo, India’s Twitter alternative, seeks strategic partner amid funding crunch. [online] Available at: https://au.lifestyle.yahoo.com/koo-indias-twitter-alternative-seeks-111144858.html [Accessed 26 Sep. 2023].
- Singh, M. (2023). Koo, Indian X alternative, seeks strategic partner amid funding crunch. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/15/koo-indias-twitter-alternative-seeks-strategic-partner-amid-funding-crunch/ [Accessed 26 Sep. 2023].