Alibaba boosts media, entertainment business with 10 billion yuan fund

NEW DELHI: In a major restructuring move by Alibaba Group, Daniel Zhang, CEO, Alibaba Group has announced the establishment of the Alibaba Digital Media & Entertainment Group and a 10 billion Yuan fund that will invest in the digital media & entertainment industry.

UCWeb, an Alibaba Group company, plays an integral role in the newly established Digital Media and Entertainment Group as a gateway and a content distributer for the strategic restructuring.

With over 420 million global MAUs, UC Browser, the flagship product of UCWeb serves as the driver for content distribution throughout the Indian Mobile Internet ecosystem. As the largest browser in India with 57% market share as per StatCounter, UC Browser is all set to become No.1 content distributor in India.

As per the Alibaba Group’s quarterly financial results, ending September 2016, there was US$541 million revenue reported from the digital media and entertainment business with a 302% increase as compared to the same quarter in 2015. The growth in revenue included the significant contribution from the mobile value added services provided by UCWeb in the areas of mobile search, news feeds and game publishing, via their flagships products UC Browser, UC News and 9Apps. Link to the report: http://bit.ly/2fv0Iq7

Digitizing Entertainment with partnerships with Colors TV and Bollywood movie ‘Ae Dil Hai Muskil’

Speaking about the restructuring, Kenny Ye, General Manager of Overseas Business, Alibaba Mobile Business Group, emphasized the rationale behind new strategy of ‘Digitizing Entertainment’, saying, “Our data tells us that entertainment related content is the most consumed category of content on UC Browser, which has over 80 million monthly active users in India. India market certainly plays an important role in our global entertainment-related business and with our strategy of digitizing entertainment, we will continue to work with top entertainment content creators to provide more quality content to Indian users and a unique engagement platform to content providers. With our UC Browser being No.1 mobile browser in India, UCWeb envisions ourselves as being as powerful as Google and Facebook and bring the global mobile internet to an era of ‘GUF’(Google, UCWeb, Facebook).”

Taking its strategy forward and expanding the entertainment related business globally, after a successful collaboration with Colors TV Channel, UCWeb also partnered with Fox Star Studios India to promote Hindi romantic drama film, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil. In a fortnight long campaign – UCWeb got first rights to ‘The Breakup Song’ (6 million viewers) and launched special section of unseen and exclusive footage from the movie (2 million viewers), video bytes from the stars, movie trivia and special posters as pop up screen and banners on its platform, UC Browser. The promotion received well over 8 million viewers via UC Browser.

Success of We-Media program

UCWeb is also setting news trends with a popular tool called ‘We-Media’. We-Media initiative gives both, a common man and a celebrity, a platform to make their opinions heard by millions of users. People get an opportunity to create, to write, share thoughts and engage with their followers on UC News and UC Browser. UCWeb also had a successful partnership with Chetan Bhagat for the launch of his latest Bestseller ‘One Indian Girl’. Chetan Bhagat wrote exclusive blog posts on UC News and had a successful Live chat on UC Browser. The event was viewed by over 15 lakh users, and attracted over 1.8 crore users to the campaign page in 3 days alone (Sept 28-30, 2016). UC News attracted a readership of 5 lakh for Chetan’s bonus chapter of the book and helped add over 58 thousand fans to his account.