Qyuki seeks to emerge as the ‘creative market place’

Film-maker Shekhar Kapur and A R Rahman launched their ‘creative’ social media platform Qyuki on December 5. We caught up with the CMO, for more on what’s in store. Excerpts:

How is Qyuki different from, say, Behance, Pinterest, Facebook or Youtube? What do you think are the high points which will drive traffic and content developers to Qyuki?

Qyuki is a creative hub that intends to look at the new paradigm in social media. It aims to unlock the creative potential of Indian youth and offer them a complete creative journey of discovery, learning, creation and recognition. The differentiation lies in the fact that Qyuki is building a creative community, best-in-class content creations by masters, and co-creation opportunities with the experts. It allows for collaboration between different regions, communities and genres; and celebration by being recognized by the experts and the community.

Please throw some light on kind of target traffic and profile of audience you foresee?

Qyuki is targeted at Indian youth residing in Tier 1, 2 and 3 markets, and Indian diaspora, aged 18 to 35 years.

As we develop additional features we will look at going deeper into Tier 4 cities and beyond. However, given that our platform can be accessed from the mobile as well as the web, participation can happen from any part of India or indeed the world.

What kind of advertisers would you target? How will Qyuki be effective as a platform for advertisers to leverage?

Qyuki offers brands a unique consumer engagement opportunity. It allows them to reach out to a super-targeted creative community, use the creative community to crowd-source new ideas, allows for co-creating brand communication with a creative community, offers opportunity to gauge the consumer emotional pulse of creative communication, and even offers association with specific genres of creativity.

We would like to partner with brands where there is a synergy with our own creative pursuits, where there is a desire to engage Indian youth emotionally.

Would advertising be the biggest contributor to revenues? How much would it contribute?  What are your plans to monetise Qyuki in the long run?

Advertising will be a part of the monetisation strategy. The other will be subscription: Qyuki consumers will subscribe to premium services offered by the platform like mentorship, learning tools, creativity tools and market place access.

Qyuki will build a market place structure where creative seekers and creators can engage. Market place partners will comprise companies that are seeking talent like book publishers and event managers. They would leverage Qyuki’s pool of creators.