About PocketFM

PocketFM is among the leaders in India’s non-music audio streaming industry. The sector spans everything from audio series, audiobooks, book summaries, and podcasts.

Pocket FM enriches millions of listeners with the best entertainment experience with its audio series, delivered by its large creator community, including the best authors, storytellers, voice-over artists and writers. The app has a vast content library for everyday entertainment, with stories ranging from romance, drama, fantasy, thriller, horror and more.

Pocket FM has a library with more than 100,000 hours of content, introducing a new binge factor with non-stop entertainment. Listeners spend an average of over 110 minutes daily on the platform, binge-ing new episodes of their favorite stories from a diverse range of titles in the library.

PocketFM’s Growth

Subscriptions, micro-payments, or ads?*

PocketFM began its attempts at monetisation with subscriptions, including a VIP plan priced at Rs 399 annually. To get users to actually pay for content, though, Pocket FM have had to invest heavily to create premium, exclusive, and engaging content. And while audio streaming in India has transitioned from radio to podcasts and audiobooks, both streaming platforms converged on one major growth driver-audio series written for the audio medium.

While Pocket FM built its content approach and libraries with a subscription model in mind, subscriptions are no longer the name of the game for the latter. Instead, PocketFM now has a two-pronged approach to monetisation-micro payments and advertising.

Getting monetisation right is a delicate tightrope walk, as many other streaming platforms have learned the hard way. In the much bigger video streaming market, the consensus in India is that a platform needs both subscription and advertising to make money.

Paid subscribers accounted for just 1.5% of the total Indian music streaming market in 2021, as per a 2022 report from FICCI-EY.

Audio series are the most consumed form of content in not just the non-music audio streaming space but in the audio streaming industry as a whole.

Payments Challenges

Built for Bharat

UPI is unarguably the most popular payment method in India and even more so in non-metro cities where Credit card penetration remains low. PocketFM wanted to offer a seamless payments experience for its users in a way that makes them feel that it just works. Solving Payments for Bharat involved understanding the demographics and their payment behaviours diligently in order to build a brilliant payments experience that works for them.

1. How do you increase the success rates?
2. How do you promote UPI as a payment method?
3. How do you provide a faster checkout experience?

Solution & Results

PocketFM chose Juspay to elevate their Payments experience, boost their success rates, and ultimately drive growth for their business. With a robust end-to-end Payments Platform in place, the complexity of managing Payments transformed into an intuitive and seamless exercise.

Improving Success rates

UPI accounts for a majority of payments volume for PocketFM and with Juspay’s actionable insights basis customer behaviour on the PocketFM platform, the success rates for UPI went up by 15%. This involved enabling the Verify VPA (Virtual Private Address) for UPI collect flow.

Driving more traffic via UPI

UPI as a payment method allows merchants cost saving on processing fee and provides a convenient payment experience for the customers at the same time. Improving the UPI flow involved experimenting with the position of UPI apps on the checkout page with Juspay’s no-code checkout experience builder.

A UPI focussed checkout page design with UPI options on top of the checkout page encouraged users to transact via UPI leading to a 20% increase in payments via UPI, and reduced costs.

Providing Faster Checkout experiences

BNPL and saved cards provide an inherently faster and seamless checkout experience to customers. Enabling BNPL options contributed to an 8% increase in Success Rates while Saved Card experiences reduced the time taken to complete a transaction delivering a 3% better Success Rates for Card Payments.

Tuning in to better Payments

With this partnership, PocketFM joins hundreds of startups using Juspay today to scale and adapt to customers’ dynamic payment preferences. With an overall 22% increase in Success Rates and a seamless checkout experience, PocketFM users can now listen to their favourite stories with the grooviest payments experience in the industry.