India has the capacity to have more than 70-75 million paying users for the news industry: Sunny Sen of ConsCent

The Indian people's mindset and attitude towards paywall and premium content has changed and, in the coming days the country will have a large number of people who will be ready to shell out money for news, as per Sunny Sen, the Co-founder and CEO of ConsCent- a data and paywall management platform.

In just over a year of its inception, ConsCent is working with more than 40 news players and managing their data. They recently also on-boarded Epic On- an OTT platform as a client. This also marked their entry into the OTT space.

"We are not biased to any format. You can add paywalls to videos, podcasts etc. You will soon see one of India's biggest news channels going behind the paywall with us," Sen said.

Future plans

ConsCent is also looking at entering the international market in developing countries. "This is also because some international news publishers have reached out to ConsCent to see if we can power their entire solutions," he said.

"Within the next three-four quarters we are coming up with extreme customised paywall subscriptions, where publishers will have over 150 templates to choose from. We are also coming up with a unique paywall that is expected to increase conversion by 80%. We are dedicated towards disrupting the way people consume and pay for content," stated Sen.

"We feel that India alone has the capacity to have more than more than 70-75 million paying users for the news industry itself. We believe that people may not be ready to subscribe on day 1, but with micropayments you get the clear intention of whether people want to pay for content or not," he explained.

Piracy and security concerns

More and more Indians are concerned about the concept of data privacy. Upon being asked how ConsCent ensures security, he said, "One of the biggest challenges is that as a consumer, whenever you visit these platforms you have to enter your name, age, contact etc. However, if the platform uses ConsCent, the user doesn't have to go through a login process again. So, that is one big benefit that our partners get. Through us, the platform can understand a lot of things about the consumer like where they’re coming from, what content he is consuming etc."

Sen further stated that they never share any data among their clients, however, they do provide data to their clients regarding the platforms they own.

Sen added that media houses that use ConsCent are able to focus on hyper personalisation of premium content and it allows them to do better segmentation and create different paywall journeys thereby creating better visual experience of their data and better user experience.

"We receive and store data in the best manner possible so that there are no leakages. We deal with the largest media houses so they also are very stringent about how data is saved and stored. Both the founders, including me, come from journalism. Having written a lot about data privacy, we are aware about its importance," he explained.

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