After weeks of speculation The Ken reports that the majority stake Paytm acquired in an event aggregating platform called Insider.in will be a deal worth 5.42 million dollars. Newswire, PTI, first came out with the possibility but said the deal might be worth around 30 million dollars. The deal is yet to be sealed and looks like Paytm will put in some money in Insider.in's parent company, OML Entertainment, as well.

Insider.in is a niche website which offers a curated set of live comedy shows, food events, exhibitions, festivals (like the Bacardi NH7 Weekender), gigs, travel expeditions and more. the platform also allows tickets to be purchased and paid for on the website. In 2017, Paytm launched services for Paytm users to book movie tickets using the app, expanding to even movie tickets sold at under 100 rupees. In March last year, Paytm partnered with PVR Cinemas to allow Paytm users to buy tickets using its app. As a majority owner of Insider.in, Paytm is setting itself up to challenge the leadership position BookMyShow (70% market share) enjoys in the online ticket booking business.

This month Alibaba Pictures, Alibaba Group's entertainment wing, acquired a majority stake in TicketNew; it's a movie, stage and event ticket booking platform from Chennai. This is the first time Alibaba Pictures has invested in anything outside China. Alibaba Group has major vested interests in One97 Communications and is a majority stakeholder of Paytm's ecommerce entity.

The market for selling movie tickets in India is somewhere around 2.2 and 2.5 billion dollars and online movie ticketing captures about 10 to 15 percent of that, growing at 10 percent year on year. Paytm is hoping to encourage more online ticket buying so that online ticketing's market share will extend to about 50 percent of the whole market in the next three years. Paytm is working aggressively to make theirs the largest and only gateway for all payments and financial services in the country.  A report from a leading daily news site reports that Paytm is also looking to procure license from the RBI to start a money fund, so that they can get their 250 million users to store their digital cash in a money market fund and earn an interest higher than that of a typical savings account.