Little Things is doing big wonders. The web series that Netflix acquired has become one of the most watched shows on the video streaming platform. It has also made actors like Mithila Palkar and Dhruv Sehgal household names and is also making the industry take notice of the talent coming on digital channels.
All this could happen thanks to the decision made by three people ---- Ashwin Suresh, Anirudh Pandita and, Aditi Shrivastava who started the digital entertainment company called Pocket Aces in 2013, with an aim to kill boredom with quality content.
And quality content is what the company has been offering via its four channels including FilterCopy, DICE Media, Gobble and LOCO.
FilterCopy which is the widest channel for Pocket Aces which they call their GEC (General Entertainment Channel) has as many as 6.46 million subscribers on Youtube. DICE Media has 2.49 million subscribers, Gobble has 239,000 subscribers on YouTube and LOCO has around 15 million registered users.
Some of the shows coming from their stable include What The Folks, Adulting and who can forget Little Things.
The company as a whole has seen significant growth in both revenues and viewership.
Talking to Moneycontrol, Pandita said, “Our revenues have increased 18 times since we created our first series and we have kept pace with our viewership growth.”
In terms of viewership growth, the channel (Pocket Aces) recorded 20 million views a month in 2016, and has now gone up to a billion views a month.
So, what has Pocket Aces done differently to see the high jump in viewership?
According to Suresh, they have given their creators access to information and the learning that come with creating content.
“Right from the time we started, we decentralized data and analytics so that every creator who is responsible to create content can see how the audience is engaging in terms of retention curve, watch time, share velocity,” he said.
How has this helped? Suresh shared an instance when their graphics and design team suggested to cut short the title sequence of the show because they saw audience dropout. The only time such a team is mentioned is during roll credits but they were ready to give up that to focus more on audience retention.
Probably, it is these decisions or execution that has helped Pocket Aces ace the content game which is also turning out beneficial in terms of attracting brands.
Pocket Aces which has client retention of over 70 percent has brands from startups to bigwigs like Pepsi, Amazon, Netlfix, Mondelez, Hyundai, among others.
“Out of the Rs 35 odd crore that we made in FY19, 50 percent came from advertising,” added Pandita.
He thinks that the distribution and the value proposition digital platforms offer will help the adoption of digital as an advertising platform.
After all, the advertising revenues for digital media companies is growing. An EY 2018 report says that digital media companies that raked in Rs 14,550 crore through advertising revenues are expected to grow to Rs 20,360 crore by 2020.
And to get a significant share in the advertising pie, Pocket Aces is coming up with more content to increase traction for its channels.
“We have launched few channels one is Jambo where you will find a lot of short form animated content which caters to smaller towns and Hindi speaking audience, infotainment channel called Nutshell which has interesting trivia, explainer videos. A lot of investment will be made towards these channels this year,” said Pandita.
They plan to launch five to six different shows this year.
“We are aiming to have one series a month on the show side on DICE between YouTube, Netflix and other platforms and three to four series on Gobble this year,” he added.
“There has been growth in the number of shows we have made from one show in 2016 to two shows in 2017 and this year we will do 10 to 12 shows and double that output next year,” he added further.
In terms of growth in content creation, Suresh pointed out that in 2019 they did about eight small format shows and in 2020 they expect to do 20-25 shows. Also, the channel count will be 2x in short form.
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