Pocket FM: a fairy tale machine

Laxman, aka Lucky, works at Chaman Medical Store in New Delhi, India. One day, the spoiled son of a local businessman calls the store asking for a box of condoms. Even though it’s pouring outside, his unkind boss demands that Lucky personally make the delivery to the rude customer. What Lucky sees when he shows up leaves him baffled. There she is, Dimple, Lucky’s girlfriend, in the arms of another man. Heartbroken, Lucky roams the streets of Delhi all night, until he receives another phone call, this time from a representative of the uber-rich Aggarwal family: “Congratulations! You’ve passed the poverty test. You’re now the sole inheritor of the entire Aggarwal empire.” 

This rags-to-riches yarn, Insta Millionaire, is one of the most popular stories on Pocket FM, an Indian audio streaming app. It’s like Audible, but instead of polished audiobooks from professional authors, you listen to user-generated shows with titles like Hellbound With You, Lunatic in Love, and Rejected Billionaire. 

Rags-to-riches stories on the platform like Insta Millionaire feel like a meta allegory of how Pocket FM functions. They promise their writers a light at the end of the tunnel — keep writing; your story could go viral, catapulting you to fame and wealth.

As of December 2024, the English version of Insta Millionaire has more than 1,300 episodes, which users have played over 235 million times. The series has grossed $15 million, according to SF Weekly. Another series, Saving Nora, a revenge saga featuring a woman whose family shuns her for becoming pregnant (without ever having sex, of course), has more than 2,300 episodes and has earned $18 million.

Pocket FM was originally created by Indian engineers for the Indian market. But in 2022, the company  expanded to the US — a much more lucrative market. Now, the platform makes 70 percent of its revenue in the US, a representative of the company told The Verge. In March, Pocket FM raised $103 million in funding, at a valuation of $750 million.

But while Pocket FM’s valuation is booming, its vast network of writers often aren’t sharing in the success and have found the platform’s demands to be stifling.

Amina SB, 19, an aspiring novelist and cafe owner in Abuja, Nigeria, loves that by publishing audio novels on Pocket FM, she can reach many more people than she would with just text. In April of this year, Amina wrote 15,000 words on the platform and applied for a contract with the company. As she waited for a response, she kept “uploading, uploading, uploading” chapters. Finally, after a month, Pocket FM sent her an “exclusive” contract saying it would convert her novel into audio but that she couldn’t republish the story elsewhere. After writing 45,000 words under the novel title Bitter Rivals Bond by Fate, for which she earned a total of $229, Amina says Pocket FM refused to promote her book because she didn’t have enough listeners. 

“Of course I wasn’t gonna get enough listeners. It had only been two months since my book came out, and they didn’t help me promote it,” Amina tells The Verge. She says she won’t keep writing for the platform and that it’s “not good for beginner writers” who might feel “heartbroken” and “think they’re failing.” 

Beyond its flashy numbers, Pocket FM is essentially a content mill for audio fiction and an example of what happens when a tech company dives into story production at scale and across cultural lines. Already, the company publishes translated and original stories in English, Hindi, and several South Indian languages. Now, it’s also trying to penetrate German, Portuguese, and Spanish-language markets.

To produce the massive amount of content it does, Pocket FM uses an extensive network of full-time and contract editors and writers from around the world. A writer can publish on Pocket FM by clicking the “write” button on the app. Once you write 15,000 words, the company sends you a contract detailing your rights and payment. You then record audio / sound for the story yourself or, as of early 2024, use AI to convert text into speech. If your story becomes popular among listeners, Pocket FM may hire voice actors for your show as well as invest in marketing it. 

“What I’m fundamentally against is having a gatekeeper… when someone decides whether a story is good enough or not,” says Rohan Nayak, one of three cofounders of Pocket FM. Nayak says that while Pocket FM is an entertainment platform, his vision was always to create a space where writers from across the world can publish their stories. “So it’s pretty much like a democratic platform,” he adds. 

Pocket FM tells The Verge that most of its writers are based in India and the US. But there also appears to be a sizable contingent in Nigeria, where Pocket FM writers spend time trading tips and concerns in Facebook groups and Reddit threads. 

Miracle Ubah, 26, also Nigerian, first learned of Pocket FM through a writing course. But after writing 9,000 words for the platform, he experienced writer’s block. Ubah’s solution: contract out the writing to someone else, pay them a share of what Pocket FM pays Ubah, and keep the rest for himself. 

Ubah’s contract with Pocket FM promises him $375 per month, with the stipulation that the novel get at least 2,000 listeners, of whom 38 percent classify as “active” listeners, i.e., people who listen to the show daily. For a new user, attracting so many regular listeners is monumentally challenging — Ubah is struggling, too. The contractor has written about 50,000 words, but Ubah says he isn’t earning enough money and he’s going to unpublish the novel. 

The writers of Pocket FM find themselves in a catch-22: the platform’s algorithm will only promote their novel if it’s already popular among listeners. On Facebook groups like Pocket FM Writers Hub and Pocket FM Audiobook (Writers and Listeners), it’s common to see people pleading for group members to give their novels a listen. 

Pocket FM isn’t the first platform with a tyrannical algorithm. Companies like YouTube and TikTok work similarly, too — they ask you to keep producing and posting, and you might become a celebrity, meaning instant wealth and status. 

After foregoing her audio novelist dreams, Amina now works as an acquisition editor for Pocket FM, meaning she helps the company hire other writers. The company pays her $50 per new writer she hires. She says she much prefers this job to writing for them because she doesn’t “work with the fear of not being paid for [her] work anymore.” She also warns those she speaks to: she doesn’t personally know of anyone else whose story has gone viral and who earned a sizable revenue through Pocket FM. 

Still, the allure of converting their writing into audio and striking gold continues to draw more aspiring novelists to the platform. “They want to try. They think maybe I’m gonna get lucky,” she adds. 

Like so many other companies, Pocket FM is jumping on the AI train, too. Earlier this year, it announced a partnership with the AI voice-cloning company ElevenLabs. The platform wants to triple its content library of over 100,000 hours and says AI-powered tools have helped cut costs by 90 percent. Before generative AI, it was a lot harder for writers to produce audio content. Even if someone had quality recording tools, they could only produce about 30 minutes of high-quality audio content each day. But “with the AI tools, this output can be 10 times more,” said Prateek Dixit, Nayak’s cofounder, to TechCrunch. 

Though AI-produced voice lacks emotional tenor and “is not the best,” Nayak concedes it’s “good enough” and that it “levels the playing field.” Pocket FM won’t stop hiring human voice actors for its top-performing shows, claims Nayak, because “at the end of the day, to be very honest… human voice and human adaptation… is a different level of creativity.” 

The company’s AI-powered dreams don’t just end at converting more text scripts into sound. In the next few months, Pocket FM will launch an AI adaptation tool that will allow writers to publish stories in multiple languages in an instant, making the platform even “more democratic.” Nayak says he doesn’t foresee AI replacing Pocket FM’s global pool of writers. Rather, he envisions this new tool as an “AI assistant” that would allow them to publish the same story in English, German, Spanish, and so on.

But what do we lose when we make stories at the click of a button? 

When asked how she feels about AI’s creative writing, Amina says, “I hate that. I hate that. I think it’s not fair toward writers because we use all our time to write and write and write. But with AI, it’s just easy peasy.” She says AI feels like “cheating” and “it’s really wrong.” Balqis, another Nigerian writer The Verge spoke to, says using AI would “make Pocket FM stoop really low.” Pocket FM’s most popular stories like Insta Millionaire and Saving Nora are full of twists and turns and tempestuous human feelings, and “ultimately, AI lacks emotions.”

Pocket FM thrives on its “vibrant creator community, composed of skilled storytellers, talented voice-over artists, and imaginative writers,” according to the platform’s website. The truth is, no matter how big Pocket FM gets, most of its writers won’t be receiving a lucky phone call anytime soon.