Even as the online content market is seeing a boom across the world, various platforms are offering users different experience of consuming the content. Like this, audio series platforms are also witnessing a demand momentum. Rohan Nayak, CEO and co-founder of audio streaming platform Pocket FM, speaks with news18.com on various aspect of the audio series market and about his company’s current & future plans. Edited Excerpts:
With the content boom in India, how is Pocket FM making inroads into the market and solving the problems for publishers and writers?
Audio storytelling is imbibed in our culture, and since childhood, we have been more inclined to listen to stories. With audio stories being consumed on the go or at leisure, audio storytelling will always be a companion for any individual act, be it driving, walking, bedtime, cooking, etc.
With over 1 lakh hours of audio series, a long-form audio storytelling category created and nurtured by us, we have been consistently expanding our content diversity and adding new content to keep our listeners tuned in. We are uniquely positioned due to the exclusivity of such content, and the serialised nature of the storytelling. We have witnessed an upward trend in the listener time-spent, presently at over 110 minutes daily, thus building the binge-listening behaviour on audio.
These audio series are powered by our over 5 lakh creator community, consisting of writers and voice actors. Pocket FM envisions providing a platform for new artists/writers and transforming them into audio celebrities with a platform to showcase their talents.
How are audio series platforms giving voice to writers and allowing them to build strong individual categories for them?
Our platform is an open stage for every individual with a creative bent of mind for audio series. Writers can register themselves with Pocket Novel to explore the possibilities of Pocket FM’s 80 million listener community across the world.
We will continue to build and nurture our creator community, empower them to create more audio series, and take their content worldwide, providing them with a platform to flourish and get recognised while we build the largest audio creator community globally.
One such creator is Anand Usha Borkar. Hailing from a small town, he quit his parent’s dream of becoming an engineer, in spite of completing his BTech. Instead, he followed his passion of writing and introduced his self-published book that no publishers entertained but got transformed into a blockbuster audio series with over 200 million plays ‘Yakshini’, on Pocket FM.
Another writer, Mandakini Dwivedi, turns the audio-series ‘Amrapali’ with more than 400 episodes, into another blockbuster and among the most trending shows presently. She did not know computer’s basics, and used to write stories on papers. With one such handwritten story, she was onboarded as a writer-creator.
There has been a regional content explosion as well. How has the transaction looked so far? What’s your current MAUs (monthly active users) and how many users do you hope to onboard in the next few months?
We have been front-ending the category formation for audio series and have made significant efforts by building a community for audio content and, currently, dominating the non-music entertainment audio space in India. We have pioneered the behaviour of binge-listening in the audio space, with our listeners spending an average of over 110 minutes daily.
As we have built a scale with diverse content that clocks over 1 lakh hours of engaging and exclusive content, we have been setting newer benchmarks on content monetisation with the launch of our micropayment model. Our ARR (annualised revenue run rate) grew by 13-14X since we launched the micropayment model on our platform in February 2022. Currently, we are witnessing over a million transactions every month.
Since our inception, we have been focused on sustainable and profitable growth. Hence, we always consider revenue as a more powerful metric than just a mere scale-up. We are glad to have surpassed $25 million ARR in October 2022 and we are on track to our $100 million ARR target to be achieved by the end of 2023.
What are the monetisation opportunities for creators offered by Pocket FM? Also, what’s your business model?
We operate on a freemium model and offer 3-4 episodes per audio series for free every 24 hours to our listeners. However, our listeners can continue to binge on more episodes by paying for one or more episodes or the entire audio series. We have recently rolled out ad solutions and brought innovations in the audio formats for brands and advertisers to garner the audience’s attention in a non-intrusive manner. We have done immense experimentation with A/B testing for our sponsored content, and we have understood the best possible access point for the advertisers without affecting the storytelling and listening experience.
On the creation side, we have made immense contributions to the creator economy, from identifying potential creative minds to nurturing them for the next level with Pocket Creator Studio and keeping them motivated financially by compensating for their creative pieces.
Our ‘Writer Program’ offers immense opportunities to our creators community, enabling them to earn up to $15,000 annually. Besides the earning opportunities, the writers will further have global exposure through Pocket FM’s international presence across 20 countries, including the US.
With our continued focus towards the creator economy, we have invested over $10 million to incentivise our creators for their contribution in 2022, with the average earnings of top creators surpassing $15,000.
What are your business goals and future plans for the coming years?
Audio series is a new entertainment category and has immense potential globally. While we validated 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 the global audiences. We will continue to expand our creator community across the world and enable them to create high-quality series for the US and global audience.
On the tech side, we have high priorities for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text-to-speech technology and have been implementing multiple projects to strengthen our language processing aspect. We are working closely with our voice artists, in optimising text-to-speech quality and scaling this process. We will continue to focus on these areas as we are truly building an AI-first approach in our content generation, content personalisation and content moderation process.
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