‘User engagement on the internet is broken’, four Delhi-based entrepreneurs realized while working in the mobile marketing space back in 2016. Neel Kothari, Sachin Grover, Shrikant Kale and Vivek Khandelwal, who were worked together on their previous mobile advertising startup noticed that as mobile marketing grew, there were two striking trends. One was that brands were investing heavily in their mobile presence, and to keep mobile users engaged, they were investing in building a mobile app.
“However, users were bombarded with mobile apps for things which were not relevant. It was in 2015, when Chrome released the web push notification API. We put both the pieces of the puzzle together. That’s how iZooto came into being,” Vivek, COO of IZooto tells TNM.
Founded in 2015, iZooto is a data-driven platform that allows its clients (marketers) to send push notifications to their subscribers on desktops, mobile and tablets. These are push notifications that usually appear on the right corner of your desktop when you opt-in for notifications from a particular website.
While iZooto has clients across industries, its focus is on media and publishers as it looks to solve the problem of audience ownership, especially for the news and media organisations.
“In late 2018, we realised that the digital publishers are able to solve a very acute problem using our platform - the problem of audience ownership. Audience ownership is the holy grail in digital publishing. And with iZooto, publishers have been able to solve for it,” Vivek says.
Using push notifications, iZooto helps publishers reduce their dependency on platforms such as Facebook and Google for traffic to the website and audience engagement.
When a news organization wants to send a breaking news alert to its readers, iZooto lets organization send such push notifications to readers who have opted for notifications from the website. iZooto lets organization customize these notifications to their readers based on the category of audience they want to reach, geographies, and the time at which they want it sent, in a simplified manner.
“The pandemic has been a bane and a boon for the news and media industry. They are going through a massive transformation. Media organisations have been forced to accelerate their digital transformation and as they do so, audience ownership, engagement and retention become even more critical. We want to continue enabling media organisations as they go transition from print heavy to digital heavy,” Vivek says.
However, while its focus is on media organizations, iZooto also works with several e-commerce websites, brands, food and beverage companies, among others, to help them engage with their audience via push notification.
For news and media organizations, Vivek says that iZooto, as a product, “is built to cater to the problem and challenges of publisher teams including editors, product management, audience management and revenue heads. We do serve a range of mid-size and small publishers. For the next few years, we intend to double down, triple down, quadruple down on this segment.”
For its customers, iZooto works like a software as a service platform, following a pay-as-you-go model and prices its product based on the number of active push notification subscribers that a customer acquires. “Customers can start with as little at $85 per month and scale to a few thousand dollars as they grow their audience. We also help select publishers monetize their audience using ads. These are ads are sourced from demand partners and we share a pie of the revenue with the publisher as well,” Vivek adds.
Overall, iZooto currently has over 1100 customers across the globe and claims to send over 60 billion notifications every month.
The bootstrapped startup works with Time of India, News18, Jagran, Trak.in, Moneycontrol, The Print as well as The News Minute, among other publications. According to case studies listed on iZooto’s website, it has helped Trak.in boosted its notification subscriptions by 10X. It also claims to have helped a Inquirer.net, a news portal in the Philippines grow its active subscriber base to over 1.8 million in less than a year with its web push notifications surpassing traffic from Twitter and Google news.
Vivek says that they are also seeing media organizations focusing on reader revenue. This is happening via a range of models ranging from subscription-based offerings, memberships, donations, commerce strategy and more. “We are working closely with our customers to help them set up these revenue models,” he adds.
Vivek says that while there are over 8,000 companies in the marketing technology space, less than 5% of them are focused on building for publishers, which is the space that iZooto intends to focus on going forwards.
“Publishers have long been dependent on platforms like Facebook and Google to access their audience. We want to help them set up a direct channel of communication so that they can build their brand and recall,” Vivek says.