Here are some interesting facts about YouTube. The major content creators on YouTube from around the world have the biggest audience coming from India (8.1 per cent of YouTube viewers are in India).
Also, India is the second-biggest market for YouTube and reportedly 93 per cent of video watchers in India are watching YouTube (as per eMarketer). It is why content creators globally address Indian audiences in their content and generate their content accordingly.
YouTube now accounts 265 million active users every month in India and from 300 plus channels with a million subscribers last year to more than 1,200 Indian channels crossing milestone.
Satya Raghavan, Director, YouTube Partnerships, India speaking on the future plans of the company said, “With the depth and diversity of the creators on YouTube, we will continue to invest in supporting this ecosystem. We are certain that for the year 2020, we will see many more regional languages rise on the platform. Additionally, for last year, we saw categories like learning, gaming rise on the platform and we believe it will grow further in this year 2020.” As per Pew Research, only 33 per cent of popular YouTube videos are in English.
Raghavan informed, “From 2015 till last year, we have made tremendous progress in engaging and activating the creator ecosystem focusing on Hindi and four South Indian languages. But it’s in 2019, is when saw the language creators growth truly explode - the depth and diversity of Indian language content on YouTube has been phenomenal.” The YouTube India home page is available in ten languages and 60 per cent of YouTube watch-time is from outside the six largest cities.
“Gaming is another genre that trended last year. More than 200 million gamers come to YouTube every single day to watch gaming videos and streams across the world. In 2018, gamers watched over 50 billion hours of gaming content on YouTube,” Raghavan informed. The category did not have major prominence about just two years ago. This is now changing due to the massive success of popular battle games. There are over 11 gaming channels in India with over 1M subscribers on YouTube and around 50 channels between 500K and 1M.
Ajey Nagar (Carry Minati) is a popular Indian YouTuber with over 9.1 million followership covering entertainment and gaming genres of content. As a content creator, he writes on what should be expected of the platform, “YouTube is already working towards many new things to help creators but one thing I would see is more features that support live broadcasting. Also, if they can add a feature where creators can match and see if particular music is copyright claimed or free to use for the video or stream.” YouTube copyright bots have made it difficult to upload content without getting a copyright tag for creators and the challenges seem to only get difficult.
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The author is Jr Copy Editor with BW Businessworld
