Longer formats and engaging conversations can drive better ROI for brands, says Samar Verma of Fork Media

Samar Verma’s Fork Media is gradually turning out be an inspiring success story in the media startup space. In the last few years, Fork has seen its revenue building up from zero to Rs 100 crore, becoming the fastest growing publishing and ad tech company.

Verma, the CEO and Founder of the company, has now set his eyes on becoming a Rs 500-crore company in the next few years. 

The company earns majority of its revenue from content marketing and branded content segments. In an interview with BuzzInContent.com, Verma talks about the ingredients required for getting content marketing right for brands. He addresses the issues of scalability, ROI and the kind of content format that works for different categories of brands.

According to Verma, longer content formats and engaged conversations will drive ROI in a much better way for brands.

On why content creators should not rely too much on platforms such as Facebook, he said, “That is a very risky strategy because an algorithmic change could completely shift, change consumption patterns and volume of the audience that consumes your content.”

Excerpts:

Tell us about your growth journey in terms of revenue and what are you aiming at this financial year?

We have gone from being a Rs 5-crore to Rs 100-crore brand this year. We are gunning for a leadership position in the media tech space in the next 3-5 years. The journey of zero to Rs 100 crore is always tougher. Our aim is to fetch Rs 500-550 crore revenue in the next three years.

Which part of your business adds most to your revenue?

Media is fairly nascent for us as it happened only two years back. The platform side of the business is the most robust one, which is everything from native distribution to influencer marketing and our multilingual native advertisement platform Adgebra. However, media is the fastest growing part of our business. In the past year, media has grown to 300% for us and that is really we are focusing on. The two significant contributors are Mashable, Curly Tales and Hauterfly.  Media contributes approximately 30% of the total revenue.

What are your monetisation models?

We haven’t launched commerce yet on content, but that’s definitely coming in the near future.  Our primary revenue model is through branded content. Our secondary monetisation model is display ads. We have recently launched commerce on Curly Tales that has deals and offers for its community. We do believe that with content one takes the consumer to the point of inspiration and from inspiration, the transaction is the completion of the journey. We definitely want to play on that journey. We are currently focused heavily on creating good content, which will able to build a community and a conversation around it, which is the inspirational side of the story. Now we are transcending to the transaction part of the story.

You have been on an acquisition and launch-spree. Any more acquisitions, partnerships and launches planned in the near term?

We are always on the lookout for similar businesses. I don’t have any plan for acquisitions, it only happens when we see the right opportunity and the business that are in synergy with our business plans and objectives. One always wants to expedite the path to growth. One of the quickest ways is to do it in an inorganic way. I don’t think any digital organisation would be close to acquisition. Any business emerging in this ecosystem has an opportunity to collaborate and there lies the opportunity to expedite the growth path.

Who is your competition in India?

In media, Fork competes with Pocket Aces, Times Internet, Network 18 and everybody else out there. With Adgebra — a multilingual native advertisement platform, the company competes with everybody from Taboola to Outbrain to many others.

What differentiates Fork Media from the other content platforms?

We are able to drive businesses with a very strong focus and profitability. We are not like other content businesses that have a massive cash burn. The other is the shift we have made from data, science and platforms to media where other companies had gone from media to platforms.

You once said that bringing in data and intelligence into content marketing will help brands scale up the number of ideas. How are you working on that front?

We are in beta phase with two products right now. One is called Brand Press and the other is Video Genie. Brand Press gathers content from more than 20,000 different sources and then we try to understand the social footprint of that content. For example, how well that content has performed in social media, what kind of audience can consume that content and what are the virality and shareability of that content.  Given that, we are able to surface trends on content. By this, we are bringing data into what kind of content works. We are also enabling the marketers to scale up creation through automated video generation, which is the next tool I am launching for Video Genie.

You have once mentioned that ‘brands do not know what to create, as they rely on the creative agency’. How can you help brands overcome this challenge?

We are bringing in the whole layer of data and content creation, which is very critical to us. It will be a huge problem-solving methodology and it will help brands know on what to create instead of just relying on the inputs from the creative agency or the creative team they have internally. I am not saying that the agencies don’t know what to create but what I meant is that they find it difficult to create it as scale. Whatever they are churning out is potentially resonating with the section of the audience but not necessarily they are going to tap into the whole universe.

Another challenge that you mentioned was of creating content at scale. How can brands solve this issue?

We are launching Video Genie, which is an automated video generation tool. The reality is that the brands look at content creation in a very unidimensional way. They expect more of a custom creation. I think the automated tools need to come into creating content, which will able to syndicate the licensed content because those are definitely avenues that will help you scale up the creation process.

You must have noticed that publishers, content platforms and creators have started shifting their dependency from Facebook and YouTube. Either they are launching their own platforms or putting content on other niche platforms and OTT players. How do you gauge this shift? How much do you rely on Facebook and YouTube?

It’s been happening for the last four to five years now where the consumption has moved to social and aggregated social networks. The reality is that the brands will follow the audiences, but at the same time, I believe that there are creators who will always be relevant irrespective of where the consumers are. If you want to build a longer-term sustainable model around your content platform, then you have to adopt the strategy where your own ecosystems are able to drive audiences and do not have to 100% rely on aggregated social ecosystems. In my view, that is a very risky strategy because an algorithmic change could completely shift, change consumption patterns and volume of the audience that consumes your content.

We do rely on Facebook and YouTube quite a bit, but at the same time, we are equally focusing on building our own ecosystems. We are also looking at search as a very intrinsic part of our strategy.

What according to you is the next big thing that will happen in content marketing?

We will see more of long-form content building versus the formats we are building today. Conversations happen when you only connect with the audiences. These days, brands are plugging themselves in short and snackable content, where I believe the ROI will not be optimum. Longer formats and most engaged conversations are potentially how ROI will be driven in a much better way.

Doesn’t creating short and long content depend on the objective of the brand?

At the end of the day, brands want great storytelling. So, they don’t really care about the format of the content. On Facebook, short format used to work a lot better. It is only now that Facebook is saying long-form is the norm. We are being defined by a third-party ecosystem that is telling us what to do. The reality is that at a brand level, you should focus on building much better stories, longer form content and engaging conversations that will always hold the test of time.