Why Are Digital Content Players Ignoring Emerging Markets? (TNW)

Andrea Boetti, a Business Development Manager at Fortumo which helps web and app developers and digital content merchants build out their monetization strategies for emerging markets, has written an article for the The Next Web to explore why digital music merchants and content players are ignoring emerging markets. That’s rather odd because smartphone content is shifting away from Northern and Western markets and heading South and East as emerging markets will soon exceed the US and Europe in smartphone ownership.

Yet, important digital content distribution platforms like Pandora Media Inc (NYSE: P) and Netflix, Inc. (NASDAQ: NFLX) are not available in emerging market countries for a couple of critical reasons Boetti goes into considerable detail about:

1. Legal rights to content like music, e-books and videos are usually licensed on a country-by-country basis and even large platforms need time to expand their business to new markets.
2. There is an assumption by platform owners and content distributors that everyone wants to consume the content they have obtained rights to (e.g. Western pop music owned by a few large record labels), but 80% of world’s population does not speak English and often consumers in emerging markets prefer local music.
   
3. There is an incorrect assumption that there is less or no revenue to be made in emerging markets because the monthly subscription model of processing credit card payments becomes unviable due to fixed fees that are higher than the one-time purchase received from the user.
   

To read the whole article, Why are digital music merchants ignoring emerging markets?, go to the website of The Next Web.

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