Even though the online content market is witnessing a boom across the world, different platforms are providing users with a different experience of consuming content. Similarly, audio series platforms are also seeing a boom in demand. Rohan Nayaktalks with the CEO and co-founder of audio streaming platform Pocket FM news18.com on various aspects of the audio series market and about his company’s current and future plans. Edited excerpts:
With the content boom in India, how is Pocket FM creating market penetration and solving problems for publishers and authors?
Audio storytelling is ingrained in our culture and since childhood, we have been more inclined to listen to stories. Along with consuming audio stories on the go or at leisure, audio storytelling will always be a companion for any personal task, be it driving, walking, sleeping, cooking, etc.
With over 1 lakh hours of audio series, a long-form audio storytelling category created and nurtured by us, we are constantly expanding our content diversity and adding new content to keep our listeners engaged. Such content, and the serialized nature of the storytelling. We have seen an upward trend in listener time, which currently stands at over 110 minutes per day, thus creating a binge-listening behavior on audio.
These audio series are powered by our community of over 5 million creators, including writers and voice actors. Pocket FM envisions to provide a platform for new artists/writers and turn them into audio celebrities with a platform to showcase their talent.
How are audio series platforms giving authors a voice and allowing them to create strong personal categories for themselves?
Our platform is an open platform for every person who has creative thinking for audio series. Writers can register themselves with Pocket Novel to explore the possibilities of Pocket FM’s 80 million listeners community worldwide.
We will continue to build and nurture our creator community, empowering them to create more audio series, and take their content to the world, providing them with a platform to flourish and gain recognition, while we Build the largest audio creator community globally.
One such creator is Anand Usha Borkar. Hailing from a small town, he gave up on his parents’ dream of becoming an engineer despite completing his B.Tech. Instead, he followed his passion for writing and came up with his self-published book, which was not entertained by any publisher but turned into a blockbuster audio series with over 200 million ‘Yakshini’ plays on Pocket FM. Went.
Another writer, Mandakini Dwivedi has turned the audio-series ‘Amrapali’ with over 400 episodes into another blockbuster and the most trending show currently. She did not know the basics of computers, and used to write stories on papers. With one such handwritten story, she came to the fore as a writer-creator.
There has also been a regional material explosion. How has the transaction been so far? What are your current MAUs (Monthly Active Users) and how many users do you expect to add in the next few months?
We have been at the forefront of category building for audio series and have made significant efforts by building a community for audio content and currently, dominate the non-musical entertainment audio space in India. We’ve pioneered binge-listening behavior in the audio space, with our listeners spending an average of more than 110 minutes per day.
As we have built a scale with diverse content that clocks in at over 1 Lakh hours of engaging and exclusive content, we are setting new benchmarks on content monetization with the launch of our micropayments model. Since launching the micropayments model on our platform in February 2022, our ARR (Annual Revenue Run Rate) has grown 13-14x. Currently, we are seeing over one million transactions every month.
Since our establishment, we have been focusing on sustainable and profitable growth. Therefore, we always consider revenue as a more powerful metric than just scale-up. We are delighted to have crossed $25 million ARR in October 2022 and are on track to achieve our $100 million ARR target by the end of 2023.
What monetization opportunities does Pocket FM provide for creators? Also, what is your business model?
We work on a freemium model and provide our listeners with 3-4 episodes per audio series for free every 24 hours. However, our listeners can continue to watch more episodes by paying for one or more episodes or the entire audio series. We have recently introduced advertising solutions and brought innovations in audio formats for brands and advertisers to capture audience attention in a non-intrusive manner. We’ve experimented extensively with A/B testing for our sponsored content, and we’ve figured out the best possible access point for advertisers without affecting the storytelling and listening experience.
On the creation side, we have made a huge contribution to the maker economy, from identifying potential creative minds to nurturing them to the next level with Pocket Creator Studio and keeping them financially motivated by compensating for their creative pieces.
Our ‘Writer Program’ provides immense opportunities for our community of creators, allowing them to earn up to $15,000 annually. In addition to earning opportunities, writers will get global exposure through Pocket FM’s international presence in 20 countries including the US.
In line with our continued focus on the creator economy, we’ve committed over $10 million to encourage our creators to contribute through 2022, with top creators earning an average of over $15,000.
What are your business goals and future plans for the coming years?
Audio Series is the new entertainment category and has immense potential globally. While we have confirmed the huge demand for this category in India, we believe audio series will be a global entertainment category. We will replicate our growth and content playbook of audio series for a global audience. We’ll continue to expand our creator community around the world and enable them to create high-quality series for US and global audiences.
On the technical side, we have high priorities for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Text-to-Speech technology and we are implementing a number of projects to strengthen our language processing aspect. We’re working closely with our voice artists to optimize the text-to-speech quality and enhance the process. We will continue to focus on these areas as we truly build out an AI-first approach into our content creation, content personalization and content moderation process.
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