- Fewcents, which offers ‘pay-per-article’ payment models allowing publishers to capture readers and viewers looking to avoid subscriptions, has raised well in excess of $1m from investors.
- In total, the firm has raised $1.6m, and it has also struck up partnerships with a range of organisations, including the video site Dailymotion and the media consulting firm Jnomics Media.
- A senior figure at the company said that content consumers do not always want to spend money on subscriptions – and that the numbers looking to do so on a monthly basis were in fact very low.
A leading provider of ‘micropayment’ services for those who are publishing online has confirmed that it has received $1.6m in funding.
Fewcents, which facilitates the monetisation of individual pieces of content such as articles, has received the funding from a wide variety of sources.
Some institutional investors, such as Hustle Fund and M Venture Partners, are on the list.
An impressive collection of angel investors have also participated in the round, according to reports.
The angels on the list include Shiv Choudhury, who serves as partner and managing director of Boston Consulting Group.
Also represented are figures from the worlds of finance and social media.
Koh Boon Hwee, who used to chair DBS Bank, will invest.
Kenneth Bishop, who used to be the managing director of Southeast Asia at Facebook, will also put up cash.
The firm will use the funding to invest in its offer, which is anchored around offering an alternative to subscriptions.
Readers or viewers who do not wish to pay for a regular subscription can instead make a small one-off payment using a platform such as Fewcents, which is known as ‘pay-per-article’.
The company said that it would be looking to ensure that the service had features that were customer-friendly, including a cross-border payments feature that allowed payments to be made in the user’s own currency.
In a statement, one of the founders of the firm said that there was a demand for strong content but not much demand for mass subscriptions.
“In recent times, users are willing to pay for quality content more than ever,” said Abhishek Dadoo, who serves as the chief executive officer and co-founder of Fewcents.
“However, users won’t subscribe everywhere and hence willingness to commit to monthly subscriptions hovers between 1% to 5% of active users for any single publisher.”
Fewcents is only a year or so old – it was set up last year by Dadoo and Dushyant Khare.
Khare has over a decade of experience working at Google, while Dadoo sold his last start-up – Shoffr – to Affle two years ago.
Fewcents already has a number of clients on its books, including the video website Dailymotion as well as the media consulting company Jnomics Media.
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