ConsCent is trying to increase the Life Time Value of a paying user: Sunny Sen

ConsCent is a breakthrough Indian SaaS Startup, which is exclusively designed to meet the growing requirements of Indian news publishers and content platforms (OTT). Established in the year 2020, it assists content platforms to monetise their content through micropayments, removing the paywall challenge, eliminating several login and payment-related frictions via its Universal Login Mechanism, Interoperable Wallet, acquiring newer users, getting actionable insights around reader/ consumer data in order to improve engagement with the consumer, converting flyby readers/consumers into followers.

ConsCent plays as a catalyst for digital growth of Content businesses and works towards transforming the way digital content is served and consumed all over the country. Content plays a very important role in this day and age and an increasing number of content platforms, creators, publications are finding and searching for various ways to monetise their content. ConsCent has introduced a pay-per-read format for Content and democratised it for over 6 lakh users within the first year itself, with over 50 media brands lapping up the idea. ConsCent's API, which is at the intersection point of analytics, payments, and targeting, delivers significant insights and analytics enabling its partners to make informed decisions, targeting users for improved content discovery and maximise revenue.

In this interaction with Adgully, Sunny Sen, Co-founder and CEO, ConsCent, speaks at length about the inception of the company, dominating trends in the publishing industry, ConsCent's experience with the publishing industry and online streaming platforms, and more.

What was the insight behind the launch of ConsCent? What are some of the key milestones that the company has achieved this year?

ConsCent began with a simple but fundamental thought – how to make premium content, whether OTT, news, or podcasts, available to millions of content consumers while allowing publishers to reach a larger number of paying users.

The answer was simple – allow users to buy a single story when they don’t want to buy a long-term subscription.

So, in November 2020, we launched micropayments as our primary solution with two of India’s largest media organisations – Outlook India and India Today.

Over time, we understood that just offering micropayments won’t be enough. We started building a full-stack solution that will allow publishers to acquire a larger number of paying users through micropayments and converting them into long term subscribers. And to do that, we needed a lot more: like a marketing automation platform, journey creators, very good analytics to understand users and their content consumption behaviour.

So we introduced a number of solutions in the past six months, and there are more coming:

• Create better and dynamic pay-walling and registration experiences through customisations and audience segmentation
• Superior visualisation of data on audience and content consumption, understanding conversion funnels better, and get AI/ML powered intelligent insights
• Improve retention, engagement and revenue using a whole host of marketing solutions like emails, SMS, notifications, and WhatsApp
• Focus on revenue-generating KPIs by tracking progress in real-time, and flexibility to edit and push changes in a user journey at the click of a button

What are the ongoing trends that you have observed in the publishing industry?

There are two distinct trends that we have noticed: first, is to grow beyond digital ads and experiment with subscription and content pay-walling. Thus, experimentation has accelerated to better monetise existing products, while developing fresh products aimed at user segments that will bring sustained revenue in business year over year.

Second, is the use of data, not just by marketing teams, but also by editorial staff. The use of data is way beyond just understanding page views, unique users, etc. It is revolving more around behavioural analytics. A simple example of that would be a 360-degree view of the user – which is important for both marketing and editorial.

What are the challenges that ConsCent is trying to solve for the publishing industry?

ConsCent is trying to increase the Life Time Value of a paying user through a host of intelligent solutions, like intelligent pay-walling, intelligent marketing tools, intelligent analytics, and so on. ConsCent is also trying to converge analytics, customisation and personalisation, and pay-walling automation into one platform that makes the lives of publishers easier, and simpler, and also reduces cost.

In 99% of circumstances, none of these data sources communicate with one another. As a result, the publisher ends up collecting data from one source and ingesting it into another in order to take action. Causing data distortion and delayed decision-making while tripling the firm’s operating costs.

At ConsCent, we have created a single-stack solution for publishers, to own, identify and manage paying user lifetime journeys through a combination of micropayments, subscriptions, analytics, and marketing tools. So a publisher can now visualise their user journey through one single dashboard, and parallelly draw insights to make faster, better decisions to drive higher revenue at a much lower investment.

Another aspect we take into consideration while designing this sophisticated technology is that we want to keep it inclusive, accessible and simple enough to adopt and understand.

What are the new products that have been launched or are going to be launched by ConsCent this year?

ConsCent renewed its focus as a B2B SaaS start-up providing solutions exclusively for the digital publishing industry early this year. Our product stack has evolved to bring the best of analytics, recommendations, and engagement tools that can help a publisher personalise and customise a user’s experience with their brand and platform to drive a long-term association.

Here is a list of solutions we have launched this year:

• Unified Login System to reduce confusion by simplifying the login process for paying users and subscribers.
• In-app Paywalls available in three languages kotlin, swift, and flutter to cover majority use case
• Multiple subscription landing pages – to let media brands design and launch unique landing pages and boost subscription revenue by up to 20-25% using both organic and inorganic channels.
• ConsCent’s smart e-publishing solution closes the gap between end users and e-platforms when it comes to the user experience -- making it easier for users to engage and convert.
• Customisable paywalls solution that offers ready-made paywall templates suited for various kinds of user paywalling experiences, such as pop-up, full-screen, timer paywalls, in-article paywalls, and so on
• AMP Paywalls for initiaising paywall on accelerated mobile pages and not miss on any revenue
• Ad-blocker paywalls, Ad-free passes and subscriptions for providing an ad-free experience at a nominal cost and recover the lost revenue due to ad blockers

How has ConsCent’s experience partnering with different publications and OTT platforms been? What are your expansion and growth plans?

Our experience with the publishing industry and online streaming platforms has been full of good learnings and experiences that have helped us solidify our belief in the need for our product stack. While we started to solve the content monetisation problem in the Indian market, we realised that it is a global problem. Recently, we have started talking to some global publications, and in time we will be sharing about our global partnerships.

Does ConsCent have any products lined up to go live in the near future?

We are launching Paywall Journey, a highly flexible and modular solution for publishers to engineer a segment-based user experience for their audience, run scenario-based tests, and maximise their paywall conversions.

Among other upcoming launches, we will soon be coming up with a refreshed goals-oriented partner dashboard along with multiple announcements to strengthen our analytics, segmentation, and engagement offerings.