In 2021, Good Glamm Group paid ₹100 crore ($10.4 million) for ScoopWhoop, one of India’s first homegrown viral-content publishers. Four years on, Good Glamm sold the same company for ₹20 crore — a fifth of what it paid — to a seven-year-old meme-marketing agency few outside advertising circles had heard of.
ScoopWhoop was started in 2013 by six advertising professionals who thought India needed its own BuzzFeed. It grew into a listicle-and-video publisher with tens of millions of monthly readers, survived a sting operation and a #MeToo-style scandal that forced its co-founder and CEO to resign, and ended up as one small, mostly forgotten line item inside a beauty conglomerate’s collapse. Its story is less about a media company than about what happens to a content business once it stops being run by the people who built its audience.
Quick facts
| Company | ScoopWhoop (Scoopwhoop Media Private Limited) |
| Founded | 14 August 2013 (first post); incorporated 26 November 2013 |
| Founder(s) | Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee, Sriparna Tikekar, Saransh Singh, Suparn Pandey, Debarshi Banerjee |
| Businesses | ScoopWhoop.com, ScoopWhoop Hindi, Vagabomb, ScoopWhoop Unscripted, Ok Tested |
| Latest FY revenue | ₹10.2 crore, FY23 (down about 47% year-on-year) |
| Latest FY profit/loss | Loss widened; reported profit fell roughly 147% year-on-year in FY23 (absolute rupee figure not disclosed) |
| Listed | Private; never listed |
| Market value / last valuation | Bought for ₹100 crore in 2021; resold for ₹20 crore in February 2025 (no independent valuation published since) |
| Key shareholders / owner | WLDD (Wubba Lubba Dub Dub), since February 2025; previously The Good Glamm Group (2021–2025) |
What they do
ScoopWhoop makes pop-culture and lifestyle content for young, English- and Hindi-reading Indians — listicles, opinion pieces, quizzes and short video — distributed mainly through social platforms rather than a destination homepage. Its readers are the product it sells twice: once as an audience for display and native advertising, and once as a testing ground for brands that pay ScoopWhoop’s in-house creative team to build “branded content” designed to be shared. Under five-plus years of different owners, its verticals have included ScoopWhoop.com (English), ScoopWhoop Hindi, Vagabomb (women’s lifestyle), and two YouTube-first shows, ScoopWhoop Unscripted and Ok Tested.
The origin
The idea came together over an Independence Day weekend in August 2013, when a group of friends from Delhi advertising agencies — most of them Indian Institute of Mass Communication graduates who had worked together at Webchutney, with one from McCann Erickson — noticed that BuzzFeed-style viral content was thriving in the US and had no real Indian equivalent. Sattvik Mishra, then a copywriter rising to associate creative director at Webchutney, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee from client servicing, and copywriter Sriparna Tikekar conceived the idea; Saransh Singh, Suparn Pandey and Debarshi Banerjee joined as co-founders. Their first post, about a Hindu lesbian wedding, drew more than 500,000 views in a day. A second piece — “If Game of Thrones were made in India” — went viral too, and within two months the site had crossed five million unique users. What began as a side project run alongside day jobs at an ad agency turned into a full-time company by the end of 2013, run out of a farmhouse in Delhi.
The struggle years
The company’s first real credibility problem came in February 2015, when, several months after taking ₹10 crore from Bharti Softbank, ScoopWhoop hired Reuters and Hindustan Times veteran Anuja Jairath as editor-in-chief and pushed to be taken seriously as a news operation rather than a listicle mill — an acknowledgement that virality alone was not a durable business. The bigger reputational blow came in March 2018, when investigative outlet Cobrapost’s “Operation 136” sting recorded ScoopWhoop personnel discussing running paid political content disguised as editorial coverage in the run-up to state elections, alongside several other Indian publishers caught in the same sting. The company denied wrongdoing, but the episode fed a wider perception that native advertising at speed-and-scale digital publishers blurred the line between journalism and paid promotion.
The most damaging setback came after ScoopWhoop had already been bought by Good Glamm Group. In February 2022, Samdish Bhatia, a former anchor on ScoopWhoop’s video vertical Unscripted, publicly accused co-founder and CEO Sattvik Mishra of sexually assaulting him in October 2021, days after the two had discussed a business matter into the early hours of the morning. Bhatia said he had filed an internal complaint at the time and later moved to court accusing Mishra, and separately his wife of abetment. Mishra denied the allegations and filed an extortion case in response. On 8 February 2022, he resigned as CEO citing personal reasons, and co-founder Rishi Pratim Mukherjee took over as interim chief executive — a leadership rupture at the exact moment the company needed stability inside its new, much larger corporate parent.
The turning point
The single event that defined ScoopWhoop’s second decade was its sale to The Good Glamm Group in 2021. Before the deal, ScoopWhoop was an independent, moderately funded media company that had taken in roughly $8 million across five rounds since 2013 — modest by the standards of India’s venture market, and never enough to fund a decisive scale-up in video or Hindi content on its own. Good Glamm, then riding a wave of “content-to-commerce” enthusiasm and flush with more than $350 million raised from investors including Prosus, Accel and Bessemer Venture Partners, paid ₹100 crore ($10.4 million) for it, betting that ScoopWhoop’s mostly male-skewed audience would help the beauty-focused group cross into men’s personal care.
The bet did not pay off. Good Glamm’s own house-of-brands strategy collapsed over 2023 and 2024 under the weight of its acquisitions, reporting a consolidated loss of about ₹917 crore for FY23, and by early 2025 it was selling assets to cover unpaid vendor and employee dues. On 22 February 2025, Good Glamm confirmed it had sold ScoopWhoop to WLDD (Wubba Lubba Dub Dub), a Bengaluru-based creator-marketing firm, for about ₹20 crore in an all-asset deal that left Good Glamm’s liabilities behind. ScoopWhoop had gone from independent publisher, to ₹100 crore acquisition, to a ₹20 crore fire-sale — roughly a fifth of its purchase price — in under four years.
The money behind it
- Seed round, December 2013: undisclosed amount from angel backers including Webchutney CEO Sidharth Rao, media executive Haresh Chawla and entrepreneur Manish Vij, who provided both capital and industry credibility in ScoopWhoop’s first months (Inc42).
- Pre-Series A, late 2014: Bharti Softbank (later renamed Ignite World) invested about ₹10 crore (roughly $1.5 million at the time), reportedly for a 36.5% stake at a valuation of about ₹40 crore — the deal that let the founders quit their day jobs and hire an editorial team (Wikipedia; Inc42).
- Series A, 18 November 2015: Kalaari Capital led a $4 million round earmarked for scaling editorial staff and building an in-house video unit, which grew from four people to roughly 40 within a year (Business Standard; Forbes India).
- Total disclosed funding: about $8.03 million across five rounds between 2013 and 2018, per aggregator data pulling from Crunchbase — modest next to the hundreds of millions raised by the company that would later buy it (Tracxn).
- Change of control, 2021: The Good Glamm Group acquired ScoopWhoop outright for about ₹100 crore ($10.4 million), ending its run as an independently owned company (Medianama; Inshorts).
- Change of control, February 2025: Good Glamm sold ScoopWhoop’s assets to WLDD for about ₹20 crore, without disclosing a fresh institutional valuation (Afaqs; Medianama).
How it makes money
ScoopWhoop was never a subscription or paywall business; it sold attention to advertisers in two forms.
- Native and branded content (the larger share): an in-house creative team builds sponsored listicles, videos, quizzes and social posts designed to be shared rather than read as an obvious ad. One industry analysis of the model put native/branded formats at roughly 80% of revenue against 20% for conventional display advertising (Finmint) — a mix common to social-first Indian publishers of the mid-2010s, though the exact split has likely shifted as the company leaned further into YouTube.
- Display advertising: standard banner and video pre-roll inventory sold programmatically or directly, a smaller and lower-margin share of revenue that depends on raw traffic volume rather than brand deals.
- YouTube and platform ad-share: shows such as Unscripted and Ok Tested earned a cut of platform advertising directly from YouTube on top of any sponsorships built around them, a revenue line that became more important as video views scaled past 150 million a month by late 2016 (Inc42).
The part outsiders usually get wrong is treating a “viral” media company as a low-cost business. ScoopWhoop’s real cost line was people: a content and video team that reportedly ran to roughly 150 staff at its mid-2010s peak, before contracting to around 36 employees by January 2025 under two changes of ownership (Inc42; Tracxn) — a shrinkage that tracks almost exactly with the collapse in its revenue and its fall from independent company to fire-sale asset.
The numbers
ScoopWhoop’s detailed financials are not public in the way a listed company’s are; what is available comes from its Registrar of Companies filings as compiled by corporate-data platforms Tofler and TheCompanyCheck. The clearest verified data point is for the year Good Glamm owned it outright:
| Metric (₹ crore) | FY22 | FY23 |
| Revenue | Not independently verified this session | 10.2 |
| YoY revenue change | — | down about 47% |
| Profit/loss direction | — | loss widened; reported profit down about 147% YoY |
| Net worth, YoY change | — | down about 76.9% |
Two independent trackers of the same RoC filing (Tofler and TheCompanyCheck) agree on the FY23 revenue figure and the direction of the decline, so it is treated here as reliable. FY22’s absolute revenue and FY24 filings could not be verified from public sources this session and have been left out rather than estimated. A separate financial-data aggregator (Tracxn) lists a “₹500–1,000 crore” annual revenue band for ScoopWhoop that is inconsistent with the RoC-filing figure by roughly fifty times; that figure looks like a broad estimate bucket rather than an actual filed number, and has been excluded here in favour of the audited-filing-derived figure.
Where the money comes from
ScoopWhoop never published a formal geography or revenue split by vertical, but its audience and content mix were consistently spread across a handful of properties:
- ScoopWhoop.com (English): the original and largest property, built on listicles and later long-form and video content for a pan-India, largely male-skewed English-reading audience — the same skew Good Glamm cited as its reason for buying the company in 2021 (Medianama).
- ScoopWhoop Hindi: launched in 2015 as Gazab Post and rebranded in 2018, aimed at Hindi-speaking Tier 2 and Tier 3 readers as the company tried to widen beyond its urban English base (Wikipedia).
- Vagabomb: a women’s lifestyle vertical launched alongside the Hindi push in 2015, intended to correct the male skew of the flagship site.
- ScoopWhoop Unscripted and Ok Tested: YouTube-first interview and lifestyle shows launched from 2016–17 that drove the company’s video-views growth, reaching a reported 150 million monthly video views by November 2016, with the news vertical contributing 30–40 million of that (Inc42).
The surprise, in hindsight, is that the audience Good Glamm most wanted — a mostly male readership it hoped would justify a men’s personal-care push — is the same trait it later cited as the reason the asset no longer fit a beauty-focused portfolio, when it sold ScoopWhoop on in 2025 (Afaqs).
The risks
- Governance and leadership risk: a sexual assault allegation against co-founder and CEO Sattvik Mishra in February 2022 forced his resignation within days, disrupting leadership at a company that had just changed owners — a reminder that founder-dependent media brands carry personal reputational risk directly onto the balance sheet (The News Minute; Newslaundry).
- Parent-company solvency risk: ScoopWhoop’s value has been dictated more by its owner’s fortunes than its own performance — it was bought for ₹100 crore during Good Glamm’s acquisition spree and resold for ₹20 crore once Good Glamm reported a roughly ₹917 crore FY23 loss and began missing vendor and salary payments (Medianama; Inc42).
- Platform-distribution dependence: revenue built on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube reach means ScoopWhoop does not control the algorithms that decide whether its content is seen, a structural risk common to social-first publishers and one that predates and outlasts any single owner (BuzzInContent).
The takeaway
ScoopWhoop’s audience-building years and its ownership years are almost two different stories. The founders built a real distribution business from nothing — five million users in two months, a ₹40 crore valuation within a year of launch, tens of millions of monthly video views by year three — using little capital and a lot of editorial instinct. What it could not survive was becoming a strategic afterthought inside someone else’s growth story: bought for a narrative about cross-selling to men, then sold once that narrative stopped being convenient. The lesson is not really about media economics; it is about what happens to a founder-built audience once the decision-makers no longer answer to that audience at all.
Frequently asked questions
Who founded ScoopWhoop and when?
Six advertising professionals — Sattvik Mishra, Rishi Pratim Mukherjee, Sriparna Tikekar, Saransh Singh, Suparn Pandey and Debarshi Banerjee — started ScoopWhoop as a blog on 14 August 2013 and incorporated Scoopwhoop Media Private Limited on 26 November 2013.
Is ScoopWhoop still owned by Good Glamm Group?
No. Good Glamm Group, which bought ScoopWhoop for about ₹100 crore in 2021, sold it to Bengaluru-based marketing firm WLDD (Wubba Lubba Dub Dub) for about ₹20 crore in an all-asset deal announced on 22 February 2025.
How did ScoopWhoop make money?
Mostly through native and branded content built for advertisers to look shareable rather than like a conventional ad, supplemented by standard display advertising and YouTube ad revenue from shows such as Unscripted and Ok Tested.
What happened to ScoopWhoop’s CEO Sattvik Mishra?
In February 2022, former ScoopWhoop Unscripted anchor Samdish Bhatia publicly accused Mishra of sexual assault. Mishra denied the allegations and filed an extortion case in response, and resigned as CEO on 8 February 2022; co-founder Rishi Pratim Mukherjee became interim CEO.
What is ScoopWhoop worth today?
No independent valuation has been published since its February 2025 sale to WLDD for about ₹20 crore. Its most recent verified financials show FY23 revenue of ₹10.2 crore, down roughly 47% year-on-year, per RoC filings.
Sources
Figures are as of September 2026. Currency converted at $1 ≈ ₹96.0 as of 18 September 2026 (Trading Economics).
- ScoopWhoop — Wikipedia, updated 2026
- Inc42, “6 Friends, 1 Long Weekend, And An Idea That Went Viral: The ScoopWhoop Story”
- Business Standard, “Kalaari Capital invests $4 mn in ScoopWhoop”, 18 November 2015
- Forbes India, “ScoopWhoop Raises $4 Mln From Kalaari Capital”, November 2015
- Medianama, “Explained: Why Good Glamm Group sold digital media asset ScoopWhoop”, February 2025
- Afaqs, “The Good Glamm Group completes sale of ScoopWhoop to WLDD”, February 2025
- Inshorts, “Good Glamm sells ScoopWhoop for ₹20 crore, a fifth of its purchase price”, February 2025
- Tofler, Scoopwhoop Media Private Limited company financials (RoC filings)
- TheCompanyCheck, Scoopwhoop Media Private Limited, FY 2025 insights
- Tracxn, ScoopWhoop company profile, 2026
- The News Minute, “Former ScoopWhoop Unscripted anchor accuses CEO Sattvik of sexual assault”, February 2022
- Newslaundry, “Samdish versus Sattvik: Equity, ‘assault’ and an unravelling at Unscripted”, February 2022
- SheThePeople, “Who Is Sattvik Mishra? CEO Of ScoopWhoop Accused Of Sexual Assault By Ex-Employee”, 2022
- Inc42, “The Fall Of Good Glamm Group: How The House Of Brands Crumbled”, 2025
- BuzzInContent, “How ScoopWhoop is making traditional media houses run for their audiences and money”, July 2019
- Finmint, “How Does ScoopWhoop Make Money? The Revenue Model Of ScoopWhoop”, 2018
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