Providing the missing piece in the global distribution landscape: Migo Founder featured on the IBC Podcast
Migo’s Founder and Chairman Barrett Comiskey was recently featured in the latest edition of the IBC Podcast, a leading program interviewing leaders from the content and technology industry. In the episode, Barrett discussed “stocking Migo’s shelves” with rich digital products, proving unit economics at scale across 1 million customers, and being on a path to 100 million customers as Global OTTs increasingly realize Migo’s unique role in the value chain.
After disrupting the mature publishing industry, Barrett applied the same innovation mindset at E Ink to deliver huge amounts of data to the under-innovated emerging markets. He said Migo started with video, which is 80% of global internet traffic, as the “initial stock on the shelves” but the goal has always been to deliver rich digital products to mass-market consumers.
“The strategy we’re running is the iTunes strategy” explains Barrett. “If Netflix and Kindle are single-purpose portals, we’re more of a general-purpose retailer. iTunes started with mp3 and then it evolved to films, television, apps, eBooks, games, podcasts, etc., and we’re doing the same thing”.
Since mid-2021, Migo has been expanding the range of products available at its “digital media superstore.” In July 2021, it unveiled educational content, which has now grown to a 40% attach rate. In May 2022, Migo launched podcasts and audiobooks, in partnership with Noice, further expanding its catalog to cover more verticals.
The end result: Migo currently has over 1 million acquired customers across more than 1,200 retail locations. At this stage, Migo has proven its unit economics at scale. “For only $1 CAPEX per customer and $0.50 of OPEX per customer per year, Migo can permanently zero-rate data and deliver 10 gigabytes per day” said Barrett.
With a rapidly growing customer base and proven low-cost structure, Migo is increasingly observing heightened interest from OTTs as the missing distribution piece in the global distribution landscape. “Global OTTs are spending $230B on content this year, but as we saw with Netflix, their TAM is down from 1 billion to only about 400 million wireline households. There are more mobile-only consumers for whom data is expensive,” explains Barrett. This is the reason, he added, why Migo will be launching two major OTT products in the near-term and is in discussions with two other global players.
Barrett also discusses how, to face content that is increasingly diverse and plentiful, a robust CMS is necessary. At Migo, this CMS took the form of Dalet Flex, which allows Migo to efficiently ingest all types of content. This carries the flexibility Migo needs to grow beyond video and audio and touch all matters of digital content.
2022 will prove to be Migo’s turning point from a small retail network into a large-scale distributor in the global value chain “We’re now at over 1,000 locations growing to 10,000 then 100,000. We have 1 million customers and we’re quickly growing that to ten million, on our way to the first hundred million in Indonesia and Philippines over the next few years.”
Listen to the full IBC Podcast here.
About Migo
Migo levels the digital playing field for 3 billion under-innovated consumers – bringing the best bits of the internet to the corner store, across the emerging world.
After bringing reading into the digital era, Kindle tech inventor Barrett Comiskey built Migo’s disruptive unique ecosystem solution to provide affordable access to digital products and services. Backed by Temasek, YouTube’s Co-Founding CTO, blue chip VCs, and key industry insiders, Migo can permanently zero-rate data costs for mobile-only consumers.
Migo launched in Indonesia in 2020 and today has over 1,200 locations covering 25 million Indonesians. In September 2021, MNC Vision Networks (MVN), a subsidiary of leading media conglomerate MNC Group, invested $40 million for a minority stake in Indonesia.
Migo carries movies and tv series from a range of top local and international providers; educational content from high-quality Indonesian EdTech players as well as from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology; and podcasts. Migo also plans to launch additional verticals including Music, Ebooks, Games, Digital Financial Services and Offline E-commerce in the next couple of years.
