Hike to experiment with monetisation this year, says Kavin Bharti Mittal

Hike founder & CEO Kavin Bharti Mittal on Tuesday said that the company will begin experimenting with monetisation later this year.

“2020 is the year Hike experiments with monetisation. We strongly believe that it’s time for newer business models to emerge, ones that are away from the traditional ad-driven models and built around the consumers. We would be taking that approach towards monetisation and you will hear more on that soon,” Mittal told Hindustan Times without divulging more details.

The announcement comes on the sidelines of the roll-out of HikeLand, a new in-app offering from the company.

HikeLand is a virtual environment which uses 3D art among other things to allow users to hang out with their friends. The new platform, in an early preview right now, is focused on mobile users.

Mittal said that the HikeLand wasn’t an attempt to build a super app.

“A super app essentially offers you a myriad of things but in a single-player experience. What we are building with HikeLand is a virtual world that enables a multi-player experience. So, while we will be building more experiences in HikeLand, we will be building it from the perspective of building the virtual world, of building a social fabric inside the application, versus catering to a single player. Also, there’s a vast difference in terms of UI/UX. In a super app, your UX is a cumulation of tabs and lists as opposed to the ‘sentient’ life-like experience of a virtual world,” he explained.

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The new product follows HikeMoji which launched in February this year. HikeMoji is a hyper-local and personalised avatar of a user.

According to Mittal, HikeMoji has received “incredible” traction as over 3 million avatars were created. He also revealed that the technology under the hood had also become better compared to the beta version rolled out in November last year.

“The ML on HikeMoji has also significantly scaled from combing 100 trillion combinations in beta to 100 quintillion combinations in V1 rolled recently. This results in a HikeMoji created in under 3 seconds that’s more life-like than ever before. Inspired by the diversity of India, HikeMoji is also the largest platform for hyper-local avatar creation,” he added.