ScoopWhoop

About ScoopWhoop

ScoopWhoop is a New Delhi-based digital media company and one of the defining names of India's new-media wave of the 2010s. Founded in 2013 by Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee and Sriparna Tikekar, it grew from a listicle-driven entertainment website into a multi-property media house spanning lifestyle, pop culture, current affairs and creator-led video, reaching a claimed audience of more than 100 million users at its peak. Acquired by the Good Glamm Group in October 2021 as part of a content-to-commerce strategy, it was sold again in February 2025 to Bengaluru-based marketing agency WLDD (Wubba Lubba Dub Dub) as Good Glamm dismantled its media portfolio. It continues to operate as a digital media brand under WLDD's ownership, publishing from scoopwhoop.com.

Overview

ScoopWhoop describes itself as a digital media company creating lifestyle and pop culture content across online, mobile and social channels. Headquartered in New Delhi, its editorial output blends infotainment — listicles, explainers, memes and quizzes — with news and current-affairs coverage aimed at India's young, urban, English- and Hindi-speaking internet audience. Its branded properties have included ScoopWhoop English, ScoopWhoop Hindi, the women's interest vertical Vagabomb, the documentary and news show Unscripted, and the YouTube channels OK Tested and ScoopWhoop Videos.

The brand's stated audience skews young: it has said it engages people aged 13 to 35, with roughly 60 per cent of its audience male — a demographic profile that would later shape its corporate destiny, attracting a buyer interested in men's grooming and repelling a buyer centred on beauty. At the time of its 2021 acquisition, the company claimed more than 1.5 billion monthly impressions and over 100 million users across its website, apps and social distribution network.

History and Founding

ScoopWhoop was founded in 2013, in the early years of India's smartphone and cheap-data boom, when a generation of young Indians was coming online for the first time and discovering social media as a primary channel for entertainment and information. The founding team is generally credited as Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee and Sriparna Tikekar, with some accounts also naming Suparn Pandey, Debarshi Banerjee and Saransh Singh among the co-founders. The venture was headquartered in New Delhi and built as a digital-native newsroom from the start, with no print or broadcast legacy behind it.

The timing proved fortuitous. Within a few years, India's digital advertising market was expanding rapidly, venture capital was flowing into content startups, and platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube were becoming mass media in their own right. ScoopWhoop positioned itself squarely in that current, building a brand that lived as much on social feeds as on its own website.

The BuzzFeed Model and Early Growth

ScoopWhoop has frequently been described as India's answer to BuzzFeed, and the comparison is instructive. Like the American site, it built its early audience on shareable listicles, quizzes and relatable pop-culture content — formats engineered for social virality rather than the front page. The approach made ScoopWhoop a fixture of Indian millennials' Facebook feeds in the mid-2010s, and it established the commercial template that Indian digital media startups would follow: audience first, monetised through branded content and native advertising.

From that base, the company expanded beyond listicles into more substantial editorial territory: lifestyle features, entertainment reporting, explainers on current events and documentary-style video. The evolution reflected both editorial ambition and business logic — a purely viral-content operation has thin margins and fickle audiences, while a diversified media house with video, Hindi-language and women-focused properties can command steadier advertiser interest.

Content and Editorial Voice

ScoopWhoop's editorial voice is conversational, irreverent and youth-oriented. Its English site focuses on lifestyle and entertainment content — relationships, travel, food, careers, fandoms and internet culture — while its Hindi vertical reaches a larger regional demographic with similar fare in Hindi. The company has consistently described itself as platform-agnostic, publishing where its users are: on its own website, on Instagram and Facebook, on ShareChat, on YouTube, and through its mobile presence.

Alongside infotainment, ScoopWhoop has carried news and current-affairs content. Its documentary and news property Unscripted covered serious subjects, including a notable early association with the independent news platform Newslaundry, with which ScoopWhoop produced the first episodes of the series (then called Chase). That current-affairs strand gave the company a foot in serious journalism, but it also created a corporate complication at the moment of acquisition, as Indian rules on foreign investment in digital news platforms meant the news property could not simply be folded into a commerce group.

Properties and Channels

Over its first eight years, ScoopWhoop launched a portfolio of distinct properties. ScoopWhoop English remained the flagship, focused on lifestyle and entertainment. ScoopWhoop Hindi extended the formula to Hindi-speaking audiences. Vagabomb addressed a women-centric readership. Unscripted served as the documentary and news show. On video, OK Tested became the company's social and creator-driven video channel, built around experiments, challenges and personality-led formats, while ScoopWhoop Videos carried the broader video output.

This multi-brand architecture was typical of the era's digital media playbook: separate editorial identities for separate audience segments, all feeding a single distribution and sales machine. The company's wide distribution network across social media was, by its own account, the engine of its reach — driving over a billion impressions a month and more than 100 million users by 2021.

Audience and Reach

At its commercial peak, ScoopWhoop's claimed numbers were formidable for an independent Indian digital media company. In 2021 the company said its digital assets generated around 1.5 billion monthly impressions and engaged over 100 million users. Its audience was described as young — 13 to 35 years old — and unusually male for a lifestyle media brand, at roughly 60 per cent men.

That male skew became a strategic asset when a buyer arrived looking for a foothold in the men's grooming market, and a strategic liability when that buyer's core business turned out to be beauty and personal care aimed at women. The audience profile explains much of ScoopWhoop's corporate trajectory after 2021.

Funding

ScoopWhoop raised institutional venture funding during the mid-2010s content-startup wave. Its best-known round was a $4 million investment from Kalaari Capital in 2015, which made the Bangalore- and Delhi-based venture firm the company's lead backer. In total, the company is reported to have raised around $5.2 million from investors including IgniteWorld, Kalaari Capital, AdvantEdge Founders and the Smile Group.

The funding was modest by the standards of India's later startup excesses, and it reflected the economics of digital media: venture money to build audience and video capability, with the expectation that branded content and advertising would eventually carry the business. By 2021, with the founders still leading the company, ScoopWhoop was one of the few surviving independent digital media brands of its generation not yet absorbed by a larger group — a status that was about to change.

Acquisition by the Good Glamm Group

On 20–21 October 2021, the Good Glamm Group — the parent company of the direct-to-consumer beauty and personal care brand MyGlamm — announced the acquisition of ScoopWhoop Media in an all-cash deal. The financial terms were not officially disclosed, though later reporting pegged the price at approximately Rs 100 crore. It was the group's fourth major buyout in a rapid acquisition spree, following The Moms Co, BabyChakra and the content-and-commerce platform POPxo.

The strategic logic was content-to-commerce. Good Glamm's co-founder and CEO Darpan Sanghvi said the acquisition fit the group's playbook — content being difficult to build from scratch — and announced that the group would use ScoopWhoop as the launchpad for a foray into the men's grooming segment, with plans to invest Rs 500 crore in the men's category over the following years. ScoopWhoop would continue to work as an independent brand and media house within the group, based in New Delhi, with its founders Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee and Sriparna Tikekar continuing to lead it and working closely with Sanghvi and Good Glamm co-founders Priyanka Gill and Naiyya Saggi.

As part of the deal, all of ScoopWhoop's investors exited except Kalaari Capital, which instead invested further into the Good Glamm Group itself.

The Unscripted Exception

One property was conspicuously carved out of the acquisition: Unscripted, ScoopWhoop's news and current-affairs show. Because Unscripted was a news property, it could not be included in the Good Glamm acquisition bid under India's rules governing foreign investment in online news platforms. The episode illustrated the regulatory fault line running through Indian digital media — entertainment and lifestyle content could be bought and sold freely, but news carried compliance constraints that reshaped deal structures.

The Unscripted carve-out also foreshadowed the tensions to come. A media brand built partly on current affairs was being asked to serve a commerce strategy built on grooming products, and the parts of the company that did not fit the strategy were the first to be set aside.

Controversy and Turmoil

In 2022, ScoopWhoop was hit by a public controversy when a former chief executive faced allegations of sexual assault, reported by outlets including The Morning Context and Newslaundry. The episode cast a shadow over the brand in the months after the Good Glamm acquisition and became part of the wider reckoning over workplace culture in Indian digital media startups.

More broadly, the Good Glamm years proved difficult. The group's aggressive, acquisition-led expansion — modelled on the American roll-up playbook — strained its finances as growth fell short of expectations, and ScoopWhoop's male-skewed audience never quite aligned with a group whose core strategy centred on beauty, personal care and female-focused media properties such as POPxo and MissMalini. In 2025, ScoopWhoop's co-founders took legal action against Good Glamm over unpaid dues, a dispute reported alongside the company's wider cash crunch.

Sale to WLDD and Present Status

In February 2025, the Good Glamm Group completed the sale of ScoopWhoop to WLDD (Wubba Lubba Dub Dub), a seven-year-old Bengaluru-based digital marketing firm known for meme marketing, which also operates a creator marketing school. The deal was reported at Rs 18–20 crore — roughly a fifth of the Rs 100 crore Good Glamm had paid in 2021. It was structured as an all-asset sale: WLDD acquired ScoopWhoop's intellectual property but took on none of its liabilities.

Good Glamm's stated rationale was strategic focus: with the group concentrating on beauty and personal care, ScoopWhoop's male-dominated audience no longer fit its plans. For WLDD, whose CEO Arihant Jain confirmed the deal, the acquisition marked a transition from a specialised marketing agency to a broader digital media player, with ScoopWhoop's viral-content expertise and audience reach as the prize. The sale was the second Good Glamm divestiture in a week, part of a wider dismantling of the group's portfolio that also saw brands such as Sirona sold back to their founders and MissMalini Entertainment offloaded.

Under WLDD's ownership, ScoopWhoop continues to operate as a digital media brand from its New Delhi base, publishing lifestyle, entertainment and current-affairs content at scoopwhoop.com and across its social channels — a survivor of two ownership changes and of the boom-and-bust cycle that defined India's first generation of venture-backed digital media.