The Latest Trend
Well, writing has always been a lucrative job, be it writing for your own self or writing as a journalist for traditional media and these days the social platforms. But within the social platforms, what we have commonly seen is writing for websites, copy lines for images and Facebook posts, until now. A new trend is emerging which includes jobs as a caption writer for Instagram. Yes, as weird it may sound, this is a job that you may get yourself if you love writing captions or a job that you may delegate to the expert writers when you struggle writing captions for those beautiful images you clicked for Instagram.
The Developers Speak
Mridul Kothari started The Perfect Caption as a sharing place for the things he was writing, two years down the line, the page has 1 lakh plus followers who borrow the captions and also contribute to the data bank. Mridul says, “The people following the page are between the ages of 16 and 26 mostly. This is when people are getting into and out of relationships.” For Kothari, it clearly seems to be working as many people now tag the account while using the captions.
In the last one year, many apps have also surfaced which help Instagrammers to come up with the best captions for their pictures. Captions for Instagram started by Nirav Ashara is one such app that boasts of 50,000 daily active users and has many categories from beauty to business in order to help users with perfect captions.
“People struggle with Instagram captions, especially those who don’t know English. It’s for people who have an idea of what they want to say but don’t know quite how to put it,” says Rajkot-based Ashara.
Aniket Manjare for Caption House shares the fact that people who don’t have a good vocabulary are the prime users of the app, but even those who manage a good English, look for options online in order to find what’s trending.
The trend is picking up fast and developers are going beyond the usual routes to suffice this emerging need of Instagram users. Two students of Indian origin in the US have developed an AI-based app that analyses the image and matches it with a relevant caption from their database. It’s called ISSA Caption and its growing pretty fast. Another app that uses similar technology is Auto Caption. Auto Caption an Indian app also analyses various elements on an image and suggest relevant captions for the same.
The Future
From Rap lyrics to Bollywood quotes, app developers are trying different things to encash on this growing trend. Though as of now all these apps are free for users and monetize only through advertising, the developers feel that big money is definitely seen in the future. A few months ago Laura Belgray, an American writer penned an article on how she is making close to $950 an hour for writing motivational Instagram quotes, which went viral and showcased how monetizing is happening for these services
Instagram’s user base in India is now 71 million monthly active users according to the latest data. And most of them are desperately searching for Insta-fame. “Users think Instagram can make them famous, and for that, they need good captions,” Ashara says.
