New Delhi: Iron Man, in all its forms, travels to China, Europe and India. So why shouldn’t content made in India have the same journey?
The idea of an English-language comic book that began in the United States, traversing across languages and geographies, sits at the heart of Pratilipi co-founder and CEO Ranjeet Pratap Singh’s vision for regional-language storytelling in India.
Founded in 2014, Pratilipi, India’s largest regional storytelling platform, emerged from Singh’s own frustrations as a reader. Growing up in a small village in Raebareli, he made his way to Champak and Chacha Chaudhary before reaching Premchand.
“I am a voracious reader. I used to read more than 150 books a year,” he said.
But when he moved to Odisha for an engineering course, he found Hindi content difficult to access online.
“In 2006, there was nothing on the internet in Hindi; barely a hundred titles. If you read as much as I did, you’d have read all the good books. A bunch of people like me wanted to read in their mother tongue, or in a lot of cases, the only tongue that they know,” he said.
The lack of access pushed him toward English books. It went against his belief that the language of your content should remain a matter of choice rather than availability.
“It should be my choice whether I want to read Hindi, English, Kannada or Malayalam, or German,” he added.
He found himself circling the gap until it evolved into the idea for Pratilipi—a digital storytelling platform designed to democratise storytelling across languages and regions. Today, Pratilipi supports 12 languages and has published over 21 million stories by more than 7,30,000 authors. The platform reaches over 15 million users across the web and app, while its app records 3.87 million monthly active users.
“Once you publish something on the internet, whether one person reads it or 10,000 people read it, the cost is basically the same,” he said.
Today, the platform hosts stories across multiple genres, ranging from romance and drama to thriller, fantasy and mythology. Malayalam is Pratilipi’s strongest-performing language by far, accounting for around 1 million of its 3.87 million monthly active users. Its share of active users rose from 22 per cent to around 25 per cent between February and May. Tamil, Telugu and Kannada form another major cluster, while Hindi and Marathi compete closely in readership rankings.
Also read: Pratilipi is the biggest boom for women writers. Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi rule
Women dominate the platform
Women have the largest presence on Pratilipi—as writers and readers.
Around 70 per cent of the platform’s users are women. The platform also skews young, with readers aged 18-24 accounting for roughly 40 per cent of the audience, followed by the 25-34 age group at around 30 per cent.
According to Singh, women also dominate the platform’s monetisation rankings.
“If you look at the top 50 highest-earning writers in a given month, at least 45 would be women,” he said.
Singh attributes this partly to the broader digital ecosystem, where many internet companies focus primarily on young north Indian male audiences.
“That means everything else becomes less competitive,” he said, arguing that women and non-metro users often have fewer entertainment options tailored to them. Pratilipi, in that sense, he said, functions as a substitute for television for many readers because of its long-form serialised storytelling format.
The platform also places a strong emphasis on user safety, particularly for women users.
The moderation, however, at the platform’s scale cannot rely entirely on human intervention. With over 2 crore stories on the platform and around 4.5 lakh stories published every month, the company uses automated systems to detect problematic content.
“We are extra focused on making sure spam, hate speech, and bad experiences are minimised. So we have invested heavily in algorithms that detect different types of things that should not be on the platform,” he said.
As the company prepares for a public listing, Singh also noted how growth expectations in Indian public markets differ from those in the United States.
“In Indian public markets, 30-40 per cent annual growth is considered elite,” he said, adding that his company recorded around 125 per cent growth this year.
However, he maintains that a public listing would primarily affect how the company allocates capital rather than changing the nature of the platform itself, which would always be storytelling.
Also read: OTT tongue exposed Indians to small Hindustans. Language purity taking backseat
Is AI an enabler or a threat?
Even as concerns over AI-generated writing continue to grow, Ranjeet emphasised that AI is primarily an enabler rather than a threat.
“People who are serious about their craft think of AI as a tool that makes them more efficient and more powerful,” he said. “People who are insecure or not yet confident enough in themselves tend to see AI as a threat.”
For him, AI also sits at the intersection of what the platform represents—helping stories travel across languages, formats and geographies.
“Traditionally, adapting content across languages or formats takes significant time and money. AI accelerates that process,” he said.
According to an internal survey conducted by the company, around 30-40 per cent of writers on the platform have already integrated some form of AI into their content creation process.
But distinguishing between AI-generated and AI-assisted content, he said, is not the platform’s role.
“The entire premise—and legally the only reason Pratilipi exists—is that we are an intermediary,” he said. “The day I start passing judgment on whether content is truly one’s own or somebody else’s, we stop being an intermediary and become a media company,” he said.
This model, according to Singh, has also enabled several writers on the platform to earn substantial incomes, including many who previously had little or no income from writing.
“At least half of these people were earning basically zero before this. Now some are making Rs 2 to 4 lakh a month,” he said. Some creators, from professions such as medicine and law, have also left their full-time jobs after earning more through writing on the platform.
“Some of the top writers even make more money than I do,” he added with a smirk.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)