Humans consume content in 3 primary ways: Written, Video and Audio. Written and Video content requires you to sit still to watch or read it.
The audio content gives you the freedom to consume content wherever you go, whether you're in the gym, in the car or at home doing chores.
India is finally beginning to see a surge in listeners of audio content such as audiobooks, OTT and podcasts. The US and China are the top two on podcast listings, followed by India, which ranks third.
According to our RedSeer analysis, the total time spent in Oct’21 – Over-the-top (OTT) audio content (including podcasts) accounts for about 2.3% of the total time spent.
It might seem like a tiny number but the same report claimed that India will have 95 million monthly active users by the end of 2021, a 34% increase from 71 million active users in 2020.
This popularity of audio content in India is driven by several factors including:
An increase in the no. of smartphone users.
The impact of covid-19 drove people indoors.
Increase in no. of first-time internet users.
Low data packs (especially true for Tier-2,3 users).
But there’s one more important factor that attracted Gen Z and millennials towards audio content.
That is increasing screen fatigue.
People look forward to stepping away from their screens - Whether to take a break or to unwind at the end of the day. Listening to podcasts or audiobooks became an easy escape from too much screen time.
This insight led founders Lal Chand Bisu, Vinod Meena and Vikas Goyal to start Kuku FM in 2018.
Kuku FM primarily targets the off-screen time of a user and fills the gap with on-demand audio content in categories such as motivation, comedy, self-development, love and horror etc.
The idea was to offer meaningful content easily consumed along with activities like commuting, kitchen work, jogging etc.
With the massive adoption and growth, Kuku FM recently announced that it has recently crossed 1 million active paying subscribers 🤯
I was a bit surprised since ‘Bharat users’ are not well-known for paying for subscriptions. That made me curious to understand How Kuku FM reached 1 Mn paying subscribers? What’s the growth strategy?
The answer is not easy as it seems, but after a lot of digging, I’m going to share the factors responsible for their growth.
1. Affordable Pricing
Kuku FM pricing targeted the pocket-friendly millennials. The free version only has limited content pieces, but users can unlock the library of unlimited audiobooks, stories and podcasts by paying Rs. 399/year.
But thanks to hundreds of influencers sharing a 50% discount code, the user can get a yearly subscription at just Rs.199.
Now let’s compare that with its closest competitors Amazon audible and Storytel.
Audible priced its membership at Rs. 199/month with only 1 credit/month to buy any title of their choice.
Whereas Storytel is economical compared to audible as it offers membership at 149/mo and 999/year.
Both of them seem a bit more expensive than Kuku FM. Moreover, both Storytel and Audible lack vernacular and regional audio content, which takes us to the next point.
2. Exclusive and Story-based content
In the early days, Kuku FM onboarded offline storytellers from Instagram, RJs from Mumbai and Audio content creators from Youtube.
Kuku FM offered these creators an easy way to record high audio content, build an audience and make money through its platform.
As a result, Kuku FM built an army of 30,000 creators, with 50% of the content on Kuku FM exclusive to the platform and only available on Kuku FM.
I discovered something similar during one of Kuku FM’s user interviews.
That user was looking for “The Rudest book ever” Hindi audiobook, which was only available at KuKu FM. (I am not sure whether the author gave rights to Kuku FM or not).
Kuku FM hosts 150,000 hours of content across seven languages - Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, and Marathi.
Recently, the platform observed an MoM growth rate of over 80% via its audio content in South Indian languages.
That clearly shows an unmet need for meaningful content in vernacular language.
Next, Kuku FM drives most engagement not from podcasts but from long-form, serialized content since most of us have grown up watching soap operas on TV.
While other players like Audible and Storytel have taken a top-down approach by first launching in English,
Kuku FM has taken a bottom-up approach where it solves the need of the vernacular first-time internet users, unlocking great value for them.
3. Collaboration with the right influencers
Almost all the users I talked to discovered Kuku FM from their favourite content creator on Youtube.
Even when I scrapped some data from SimilarWeb, I noticed ~17% of traffic coming from Social channels and Youtube contributing a whopping 97% of total social traffic.
Kuku FM partnered with several celebrity youtube influencers such as Ankur Warikoo, Ishan Sharma, and Priya from Finology legal.
These influencers often discuss self-development and personal finance, targeting the same audience as Kuku FM i.e Gen Z.
And each of them posted a video on how to read audiobooks for free or How to use Kuku FM app with a link to the Kuku FM’s website.
The primary goal of these influencer campaigns is to drive paid subscriptions and desirability around Kuku FM’s app.
One last thing…
Kuku FM has a network effect baked into its product. That means the value of its product increases as the number of users increases.
Kuku FM demonstrates direct network effects; Each new creator adds value to the platform by creating more consumer-follower connections.
So, When popular creators produce or give exclusive rights of their content to Kuku FM it will surely attract a huge audience following that creator.
This will not only help Kuku FM to reduce its CAC (Customer acquisition cost), it would be hard for the competitors to break the flight, making the platform further defensible.
If you like what you read, please share this post within your company Slack or Whatsapp groups. It means a lot to me :)
Network effect is truly explained in this Article.
That's truly add value to my journey