Buoyed by US traction, Pocket FM eyes more global forays

Audio streaming platform Pocket FM is planning to extend its world presence, after the ‘nice traction’ it’s seeing within the US. The Gurgaon-based firm made its foray into the market in November final yr.

“As a format, audio is way more engaging and monetizable than audiobooks and podcasts,” Rohan Nayak, cofounder at Pocket FM, advised ET.

Pocket FM recorded greater than $25 million (about Rs 205 crore) annualised income run-rate (ARR) as of October 2022. In November final yr, the platform launched within the US. And the corporate determined to put extra emphasis on determining the business mannequin to gas these ambitions.

“We are operating at approximately a 65-70% gross margin right now. And if you compare that with the industry standard on content products, like music, or any of the video formats, you will see that it’s quite healthy,” he mentioned, hinting how the corporate is pursuing a aim in the direction of hitting profitability.

“We wanted to build a freemium business model, because in the long run, freemium is a lot better in terms of aggregating users and converting them to paying users,” Nayak mentioned. “We realised that micropayments worked a lot better for us… Although 90% of our revenue comes from micro payments, we are now sort of expanding our ad team to get more as we are a freemium product, we need ad revenue coming as a sort of reasonable source of revenue.”

Nayak mentioned at a time when advert spends had been being minimize extensively, Pocket FM was comparatively shielded from the impression as it isn’t actually depending on commercial {dollars} contemplating most of its income comes from micropayments, which come from the consumer.

“So any of these things in the advertisement space don’t impact us at all from a revenue standpoint,” he clarified. “And actually, amidst this downturn, we have actually scaled our revenues. We have grown efficiently, despite all of the turns around us. Fortunately, we are in a position where we have figured out monetization really well.”Nayak added that audio has the very best engagement amongst all codecs in comparison with quick video or lengthy video content material. The cause being that audio is straightforward to eat because it would not tie a consumer down and is the one 24/7 consumption medium. He added that in 2021 when the corporate began scaling the platform by way of a consumer base, it noticed 8-9 instances progress in customers.

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