Essay · 20 min read

Vernacular Apps, the English Language Premium, and Monetising the Next 200 Million

Sajith Pai · sajithpai.com Free Advanced India

This is the deep dive on why the 'next 200 million' users are real but hard to monetize, which is exactly the trap that inflates Indian TAMs. It shows how ad-based and subscription models behave very differently across the India stack. Read it when you are tempted to count non-English, low-ARPU users as full-value market.

  • Adding users is easy in India, extracting revenue from them is not
  • ARPU collapses as you move from India1 to India2 to India3
  • Model the revenue per segment separately, never blend it
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The question it answers

  1. How do I size a market for India specifically when data is messy?

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