Fewcents co-founders Dushyant Khare and Abhishek Dadoo
Many publishers are targeted on changing guests to subscribers, however there’s one other vital bracket: individuals who need to view a premium article or video, however not sufficient to enroll in a subscription. Fewcents, a Singapore-based fintech startup that permits publishers to take “micropayments” for particular person items of content material, introduced in the present day it has raised $1.6 million in seed funding.
Fewcents can be utilized to monetize articles, video and podcasts. It accepts 50 currencies and is supposed to function a complementary stream of income to ads and subscriptions. Its present purchasers embrace India’s Dainik Jagran, which has a readership of 55 million; Indonesian information website DailySocial; and streaming video website Dailymotion. The firm, which monetizes by sharing income with digital publishers, additionally struck a partnership with Jnomics Media to increase in Europe.
Its funding spherical enterprise capital funds M Venture Partners and Hustle Fund. Participation additionally got here from angel traders from a number of the high fintech, adtech and media firms: Koh Boon Hwee (fomer chairman of DBS Bank); Kenneth Bishop (former managing director of Southeast Asia at Facebook); Jeremy Butteriss (head of partnerships at Stripe); Shiv Choudhury (associate and managing director of the Boston Consulting Group); Francesco Alberti (former APAC regional gross sales director for Bloomberg Media Distribution); Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng (Summit Media president); Prantik Mazumdar (Dentsu managing director), Saurabh Mittal (Mission Holdings chairman and founder) and Nitesh Kripalani (former director and nation head of Amazon Video India).
Fewcents was launched final 12 months by Abhishek Dadoo and Dushyant Khare. Dadoo’s earlier startup Shoffr, an online-to-offline attribution platform, was acquired by Affle in 2019. Khare spent 12 years working at Google, together with as director of strategic partnerships in Southeast Asia and India.
In an e mail, Dadoo and Khare instructed TechCrunch that just one% to five% of publishers’ lively customers are keen to decide to a month-to-month subscription. The majority are informal or referred customers, and publishers depend on promoting to monetize that visitors.
Content creators are experimenting with micropayments, and different companies embrace Flattr, which permits folks to make one-time contributions and Axate’s pay-per-article instruments. But publishers nonetheless debate how efficient the mannequin is and final 12 months, TechCrunch reported that Google determined to not launch a tipping function for websites.
To efficiently implement a pay-per-content mannequin, publishers not solely want to supply compelling content material, but in addition make it extraordinarily straightforward for folks to pay for it. For Fewcents, this implies fixing three key challenges, Dadoo and Khare mentioned. First, they should create a ubiquitous platform, since informal customers received’t need to enroll in a brand new service each time they go to one other website. It additionally wants to simply accept cross-border funds in native forex utilizing the preferred fee strategies, like digital wallets. And publishers want to have the ability to handle digital rights, like how lengthy somebody has entry to content material.
Publishers additionally want to find out worth factors that received’t flip away consumers, however will generate substantial sufficient income. Fewcents at the moment makes use of current visitors knowledge to manually worth each bit of content material. “Based on the supply-demand curve within each geography, we retroactively change the price to get the best revenue results,” Dadoo mentioned. “However, as we develop our AI algorithms, the intent is to dynamically suggest the pricing depending on the geography and the semantics of the content.”
Khare mentioned that by unbundling content material, Fewcents may also present deeper knowledge than pageviews, serving to them perceive the preferences of particular markets and person segments, and develop personalized “micro-bundles.” He added that Fewcents’ aim is to have the ability to robotically suggest personalized content material…
