What cooked Koo’s goose, a case study

The collapse of Koo, a desi version of microblogging site X (formerly Twitter), raises the obvious question on innovation. What differentiated Koo from its established role model with a global reach? Its founders had a vision of providing social media platforms in local languages, in which 4 out of 5 people on the planet communicate. So, there was a differentiator to begin with. But it acts against the scale effects X enjoys due to the global reach of English. In India itself, Koo would have had to become a dominant force in roughly 20 languages. Market fragmentation works against any disruptor, and even if one were to acquire the necessary heft in, say, Tamil, there are no guarantees of a repeat in Malayalam.

This applies to operations as well. Capital and technology supporting a multilingual social media platform will be of the same order as one running on a single language. But the content moderation requirement is significantly higher. Marketing becomes more complicated, as does navigating jurisdictions of countries where English isn’t significantly in use. Investors may see these expenses as disadvantageous to a local-language microblogging site when there are immensely dominant mainstream forces at play. Even with the anti-X support Koo enjoyed at home, its global ambitions may have been lofty.

Support, such as it was, by a government at loggerheads with X’s content curation can be a mixed blessing. Elon Musk bought Twitter with the promise of maintaining it as the town square for democracy, and any backing by state actors to rivals will be seen against that perspective. There is no reason to believe X can negotiate the best terms with governments for free speech. But disruptors must demonstrate even stronger credentials. This prospect can be daunting for investors. Koo’s debacle will reset objectives, both business and political, for a new bunch of players who rightly believe a local language model exists for social media. Possibly, mainstream social media will move into that space.