India’s content creator space has taken off in recent years as more people now access the internet on their smartphones.
Digital content creation has emerged as an attractive industry for youth with several creators acquiring celebrity-like status, brand deals, and so on. Push from digital platforms like Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and others has further fostered this industry. But there’s a catch: only a handful of creators are able to monetize their content effectively.
This glaring gap hasn’t gone unnoticed, and many startups are working towards addressing this. One of them is Gurgaon-based Cosmofeed, a content monetization platform.
Founded in 2021 by Vivek Yadav and Vishnu Pathak, Cosmofeed provides a variety of solutions to help content creators, especially in smaller towns, to build their community, and get better discovery and monetization of their content.
Yadav told Entrackr that creators can use Cosmofeed to monetize content by offering content behind a paywall. Creators have the freedom to set the price for unlocking the gated content.
The startup raised $1.5 million in a seed funding round earlier this year. The round was led by Growx Ventures, Waveform Ventures, and 9 Unicorns, and also saw the participation of Silk Bridge Partners (SBP) along with Swati Mohan (ex-Netflix India CMO), Rannvijay Singha, and Subhadip Nandy (trader, financial educator).
Another highlight of the platform is its subscription communities. This is for creators who want to offer content on a monthly recurring subscription plan. Other features include creating and selling courses and hosting webinars and virtual events. There’s also an affiliate layer that allows users to share content by creators with their friends and families.
Cosmofeed generates revenue through a 10% commission on transactions on its app.
Yadav said that the platform is currently used by 3,000 content creators and they aim to increase this number to 10,000 by the end of March 2023. Creators make an average of Rs 50,000 per month on Cosmofeed, he added.
Cosmofeed competes with platforms like Rigi, which offers similar tools to monetize content. Outside India, Patreon and Gumroad are among the popular platforms used by content creators.