Why is the ‘Bharat’​ customer finally paying for content?

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Kuku FM, an audio storytelling platform recently claimed that they have 250k+ paid subscribers across India, customers who prefer content in their own regional language.

StageOTT, a regional OTT players also announced that they have 60k+ paid subscribers in Haryana alone; this OTT provider delivers content in local Haryanvi dialect and will soon be expanding basis the dialects, rather than overall language or geography.

Well, just a couple of years back, we would not have imagined people from Tier 2 or Tier 3 India paying for subscriptions and this thought was echoed by me too. And why wouldn’t I?

I have seen people buying Amazon Prime’s hit show Mirzapur on a pen drive for INR 40 in Tier 2 towns. INR 40 for the entire show on a pen drive…

So the obvious question that comes to your mind is ‘What Happened or What Changed’????

If you do a cursory search, you will come across these points which have quite often played out in other countries including China too:

1. Increase in number of smartphone users
2. Increase in number of internet users and time spent on internet due to cheap data
3. Payment mechanisms which allow for seamless transactions
4. Trust buildup to make online payments

All these points stand true; Chinese smartphone makers ensured that smartphones with top notch features were accessible at affordable prices, Jio ensures cheap data, fintech startups allowed for transactions to occur more seamlessly and startups like Flipkart built that trust over a period of time where people were comfortable making online payments.

But how does this account for Tier 2 and 3 willing to pay for content? The key point here is ‘It is easy to pay for content, I also somehow trust this platform, BUT WHY DO I PAY FOR IT WHEN I CAN GET IT FOR A CHEAPER PRICE OR FOR FREE?’

I think the answer to this lies in a combination of these 3 points:

• Customer has recognized the price of quality:

To understand this point, just take a few steps back and understand what the customers were doing earlier or how were they consuming similar content earlier. You usually had these small standalone shops in crowded markets where a guy would sit on a stool in front of a table with stacks of CDs piled up on it. These CDs were mostly pirated and their quality was often questionable. Either the recording in itself was bad or the CD had so many scratches on it that the experience was spoilt. You never knew whether you would be able to start or finish the content that you had bought. Bad quality seemed an inevitable and expected part of the entire experience.

Then technology changed, you could copy content over pen drives, which is what started happening with the shows from OTT platforms. You come to the shop with your pen drive, copy the content and pay a minuscule amount. For all you know, if Amazon Prime was a standalone OTT entity, they could have sold sachets with individual shows. The average revenue per customer (ARPU) would have been high enough.

More importantly out here, over a period of time people got used to the high quality of content, both in terms of content quality and the experience in itself. No longer did you view questionable quality content and no longer was the experience subject to scratches on the CDs. Once the customer got the hang of good quality, they could never go back.

• Cultural change with respect to handling money:

There was this joke by a famous Indian comedian, Pratyush Chaubey — ‘All these startups are making it easy to transfer money, but when there is no money, what will we transfer?’…While the joke was really apt, it is important to understand here that the point here is not about whether you have money or not. It is more about a change in thinking and change in overall mindset with respect to money. The last generation was all about savings, whereas this generation is all about spending. We are open to spending on far more things and experiences as opposed to the last generation. We can delve more into this point, but that is for another time.

• Escape from Reality:

This is a very subjective point, but we all tend to have that escapist mentality in our lives to a certain extent, where we want to forget everything and get into some other world. These entertainment shows provide exactly the same — an escape from the humdrum lives that we tend to live in. As a result, more and more people are willing to pay for this kind of content as opposed to let’s say educational content, which will still require a lot more selling and a lot more tangible outcome attached to it.

Cultural shifts along with technological advances are finally driving the winds of change!!