Scan the homepage for ScoopWhoop, and it doesn’t take long to notice its similarities to BuzzFeed. Most of the articles have a pop-culture bent and are formatted as listicles. Here’s a sampling of headlines:
12 Pop-Culture Inspired Costumes From 2021 You Need To Try This Halloween
10 Times Gunther Was The Funniest Character On FRIENDS Without Saying A Word, We'll Miss You Legend
How Many Of These Top-Rated Amazon Prime Video Originals Have You Watched?
The site isn’t an exact clone of BuzzFeed, however. There are two key differences: just about every writer for ScoopWhoop hails from India, and the vast majority of its content focuses on Indian-related topics. Here are a few more headlines:
Can You Tell Which Of These 16 Words We Use Every Day Are Urdu Or Hindi?
Little Boy Salutes A Soldier At Bengaluru Airport, Heartwarming Video Goes Viral
Who Is Sharvari Wagh? Here’s Everything To Know About The ‘Bunty Aur Babli 2’ Actor
Founded in 2013 by several colleagues at a marketing agency, ScoopWhoop has not only become one of India’s most viral publishers, but its YouTube videos also serve as a vital counterbalance to the highly partisan shouting matches that dominate the country’s TV news. Over the past eight years, it’s raised millions of dollars of investment, amassed an audience of 100 million users, and built a robust brand advertising business. Earlier this month, it was acquired by Good Glamm Group, which sells direct-to-consumer beauty products.
How did ScoopWhoop evolve from a simple BuzzFeed clone to one of India’s biggest digital publishers? Back in April, I interviewed two of its top executives about the site’s origin stories, its expansion into video, and its monetization strategies.
Let’s jump into my findings...
Founding a company in incognito mode
ScoopWhoop was born out of a night of drinking in a New Delhi apartment. Several marketing professionals, most of whom worked at an agency called Dentsu Webchutney, were discussing the prevalence of “listicle” websites and wondered how difficult it would be to create a viral listicle of their own. The conversation led to the launch of a simple Wordpress site and a few listicle articles the group brainstormed together.
One of those articles — an imagining of which Indian actors could be cast as Game of Thrones characters — exploded on Facebook. “We put it up on our Facebook pages, and a couple friends of ours put it on their pages,” said co-founder Rishi Pratim Mukherjee. “It basically just took off from there, spreading like wildfire through our friends’ circles on Facebook.” When the group returned to work the next week, they were stunned to see ScoopWhoop on the computer screens of several colleagues, especially since their names didn’t appear anywhere on the website. “We didn’t have official permission to launch it. We actually did this in incognito mode for about three to four months before we were caught.”
One day, the ScoopWhoop founders received a text message from Siddharth Rao, the CEO of Dentsu Webchutney. “He went to whois.com,” said Mukherjee. “We were naive enough not to mask our domain origin.” For about five minutes, they all thought they were about to be fired, but on the call Rao took an immediate interest in the website’s performance. “We showed him our Google Analytics dashboard, and when he saw the pageviews, the kind of engagement we were getting while bootstrapping it in the evenings after work, he was taken aback. He didn’t know that we were operating at that kind of scale without any distribution or branding. That’s when he basically told us that this is something that can become a full fledged business, but we’d have to do it full time.” Rao was telling them they should quit their jobs at his agency. He also offered to invest in the company.
Freed from their day jobs, the ScoopWhoop team was able to ramp up article production and ride a wave of exponential Facebook traffic. “This was the time when Facebook was actually making huge bets in the publishing space in terms of trying to get big and new publishers on board,” said Mukherjee. “Their algorithm was very publisher friendly, and because we were the first people to do millennial content in India, we rode that Facebook wave in 2013, 2014, and we can attribute a lot of our initial velocity to Facebook during that time.”
Mukherjee readily admits that ScoopWhoop content back then wasn’t very sophisticated. “We initially only had about three people writing articles, and we focused on content that didn’t require a lot of in depth or journalistic research.” Their early articles fell under a category Mukherjee referred to as “identity pieces.” He gave the example of an article titled “X things only people with glasses would understand.” If the author could accurately nail several common traits among those who wear glasses, then the article had a high likelihood of being shared by that subculture.
Obviously, ScoopWhoop wasn’t the only publisher to stumble upon these insights. The mid-2010s are littered with the carcasses of long-forgotten websites that leveraged Facebook’s free traffic, only to fall into obsolescence the moment the social giant changed its Newsfeed algorithm. Luckily for ScoopWhoop’s founders, they saw the writing on the wall before Facebook made its pivot. “We understood just doing light hearted pieces that trend for a day or two before dying out would end up in failure,” said Mukherjee. ScoopWhoop needed to build brand recognition, and it couldn’t do it with just listicles. “What we did is we hired a video team and started investing in video content. We hired a team of journalists to produce content that was more newsy in nature. That was how the identity of ScoopWhoop started to grow.”
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