New Beginnings Reviews: photo

"Yet another girly app,” Panduranga MB, 26, told himself as he tried Meitu’s photo-editing app, BeautyPlus. He had just taken a selfie on his mobile phone and the facial recognition tech in the app allowed him to change the sharpness of his nose, the shade of his skin, size of his eyes and remove scars — basically anything to beautify his picture. A few minutes later, he was hooked on to an app he hadn’t even heard of 24 hours ago. The graphic designer from Bengaluru had downloaded the app after Meitu Inc offered him a job. All he knew about the company was that it was a Chinese developer with a stable of artificial intelligence-led beauty apps. The app’s features reminded him of Photoshop, a graphics editor from Adobe widely used by professionals like him. This was Photoshop for dummies. He knew a thing or two about people’s obsession with sharing their photos on social networks — 95 million photos are posted on Instagram every day, and 100,000 are uploaded on Facebook every minute. Several surveys have suggested over 50% of users edit their photos before posting these online. “Users need these apps.” He did the math and joined the company. 65180506 Like Panduranga, a lot of digital natives are oblivious of the magnitude of Meitu’s user base. At last count, its apps — Meitu has over 15 photo-editing apps — have been downloaded on 1.2 billion devices across the world. The company refuses to share country-specific numbers, but sources say it has a user base of 100 million in India across platforms and devices. Meitu is not the only success story in this space. Taiwanese company Perfect Corp’s YouCam Perfect app is used by 15 million Indians every month. PicsArt, a US-based photo-editing app, gets over 23 million monthly active users from India. B612 and Sweet Selfie, beautification apps of South Korean and Chinese origins, respectively, are other prominent members of this global Android download club of 100 million. 65180552 Closer home, approximately 10 million users are trying out one or more of the 20 leading photo-editing apps on a monthly basis. However, the rapid rise of photo-editing apps in India has gone largely unnoticed in the public discourse. This is despite there being at least 10 photo-editing apps among the top 100 free apps on Android. Major tech players, however, sensed the potential in photo-editing apps early on. Google acquired the photo-editing app Snapseed way back in 2012. Motorola launched its own stock photo-editing app called Moto Photo Editor last year. “At present, all handset makers are looking to include AIled beauty mode in their camera phones,” says Gaurav Nigam, product head at Lava International. A one-time purchase of tech from these photo-editing apps can cost original equipment makers anywhere between Rs 2 crore and Rs 5 crore. There is nothing girly about them, either. A lot of app developers in this genre say men contribute to over 40% of their user base. Experts peg the market size for such apps at Rs 100 crore in India. It is a business brimming with potential, and India is a market these players cannot ignore. Meitu, for one, counts India as its biggest overseas market. In China, Meitu is a proprietary eponym: the company’s gamut of 20 products include selfie phones, selfie-editing apps, and photo- and video-sharing platforms. Together, they fetch Meitu 300 million monthly active users (MAUs) in mainland China, according to the listed company’s annual report of 2017-18. Outside China, it has over 110 million MAUs. “We are competing against Snapchat and Facebook. I’m not saying it, the numbers are,” says Priyanka Sharma, Meitu’s India business development manager. Meitu’s India journey started in July 2016 with the launch of BeautyPlusMe, now rebranded as PlusMe. It’s a 3x lighter version of Meitu’s flagship photo-editing app, BeautyPlus, and meant for users in tier-2 and -3 India who can’t afford to download a 48MB app on their phones. 65180558 PlusMe became India’s most trending app on Android that year. Then, in 2017, the company launched BeautyPlus in India, along with other popular beauty apps such as MakeupPlus and AirBrush. BeautyPlus now ranks 30th on Play Store’s Top Free Apps chart in India, much ahead of cab aggregators such as Ola and Uber, hyperlocal majors like Swiggy and the one-time-millennial-favourite Snapchat. Globally, market research company App Annie ranked BeautyPlus among the top 8 non-gaming apps on iOS for three consecutive years from 2014. Sharma says a lot of her friends from school use BeautyPlus. They don’t go public about it, though. She figured this out when some of them forgot to remove the app’s watermark from their pictures. That’s the challenge in India, she says. People don’t want to openly talk about using these apps. “They post edited pictures of themselves but want their friends and followers to believe that ‘this is how I woke up’.” Marketing beauty apps in India is a challenge, says Vinita Joshi, Meitu India’s former marketing manager. “They’ll use it in private and abuse it in public.” BeautyPlus has tried to tackle this challenge by roping in celebrities like Shilpa Shetty to post pictures using its filters. It also introduced popular movie filters, such as the royal look of Deepika Padukone from Padmaavat for women and the gory but powerful appearance of Ranveer Singh from the same movie for men. “This is only a means to retain and refine the user base,” says Sharma. Most of these apps spend next to nothing on customer acquisition. Rajat Gupta, head of growth marketing at Times Internet (it is part of the same group that brings out ET Magazine), had led the launch of B612, a selfie-editing app, in 2014 when he was working with the mother brand Line Corp. “People took to B612 because it allowed them to edit a photo by showing filters even before you clicked the picture.” There was no budget set aside to promote B612. His mandate was to promote Line messenger(which was endorsed by actor Katrina Kaif ). Everything else was in the periphery. Four years hence, Line messenger is long forgotten, while B612 is one of the top five photo-editing apps in India. For those wondering about the name, B612 is the asteroid from the famous French novella, The Little Prince. “The product manager had read a lot of fantasy stories in his childhood,” quips Gupta. The realisation that there was no competition in the men’s segment in the photo-editing app world made Bengalurubased developer Sunitha Gadigota look at the space. In December 2016, she launched Hairy — a hairstyle editing app for men. Today, it is the fourth-most popular photography app in India on Android. Men in tier 2 and 3 towns sometimes download at least two photo-editing apps, says Lava’s Nigam. Some of these downloads happen because entry-level smartphone users from small towns are not able to go back to default settings on the first app. Gadigota’s company Pixel Force runs several other photo-editing apps for both sexes. She earns Rs 3 crore annually from in-app advertising, her only revenue stream. Monetisation strategies have not evolved proportion to user growth in this category. Meitu has failed to turn in a profit in the decade since its launch in China. It did reduce its losses to $7 million last year, down 91% compared to the previous year. The company still intends to “focus on user growth, retention and marketing” for its products in India. US-based photo-editing apps such as PicsArt and VSCO rely on a second subscription-based app to make money. PicsArt has PicsArt Gold while VSCO has VSCO X (VSCO X alone has over a million paid Tanuj Mishra, India director of business development for Perfect Corp. YouCam Makeup has 3.5 million MAUs in India. At present, L’Oréal is using its virtual try-on technology. The Paris-based company also acquired ModiFace, an AI-based makeup app, recently. A lot of photo-editing apps have a secondary makeup app that they don’t focus on when it’s actually the one that can make them profitable, says Gurgaon-based Mishra. 65180596 Meitu is also banking on its second app Makeup Plus to kick-start monetisation in India. French cosmetic products chain Sephora has seen a 30% conversion rate for users who try products through its Virtual Artist app, says Vivek Bali, COO at Sephora India. “We should be launching it in India soon.” Internationally, these apps have become the way of doing business in the beauty industry, says Nykaa founder Falguni Nayar. It’s a relief when you don’t have to wash your face every time after you’ve tried a makeup product. You just have to hit reset on your phone or a tablet in a store. However, virtual tech has its limitations. Ultimately, it’s a photo showing how a product may look on you. For many users, it is a shortlisting engine at best. That said, it is critical to most players in the beauty segment, says Maneesh Mittal, chief of omnichannel at Shoppers Stop. The retailer is actively working with a few photo-editing apps to roll out pilot projects, he adds. Since freemium revenue is a challenge, perhaps commerce is the next logical step for these apps to monetise their large user base.