Small payments, big impact: Digital content companies adopt sachet culture
FANCODE
The digital landscape in India, with its vast user base of over 1.2 billion active internet users, provides a fertile ground for a diverse array of businesses. While these businesses may operate in different sectors, they often encounter a common challenge: finding a sustainable monetisation model.
In this dynamic digital environment, where platforms like Netflix and Dream11 rely heavily on net banking-initiated transactions for revenue, the payment methods different businesses employ can vary significantly.
However, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) has gained significant traction in India, facilitating transactions worth trillions of rupees and being used by hundreds of millions of individuals and merchants.
What’s particularly intriguing is that approximately half of the UPI transactions can be categorised as small or micropayments, with amounts as low as Rs 200. This growing popularity of micropayments has caught the attention of digital businesses seeking innovative monetisation strategies.
Embracing micropayments, involving frequent, smaller purchases, could be the key to propelling digital content platforms into their next phase of growth.
This approach is reminiscent of the “sachet sales model” used by fast-moving consumer goods companies to boost revenue during periods of decreased demand.
afaqs! spoke to the heads of PocketFM, Winzo, and FanCode to understand how they identified micropayments as a viable revenue stream and how they have been able to utilise the sachet model of business in the digital space.