Mumbai: At a time when Indians clock nearly 8.46 hours per week consuming videos (from TikTok to YouTube), this large audience is fuelling a demand for engaging and rich content across the board. Animation, is not all child’s play. In fact, animated news creator GoBisbo Broadcasting Network Ltd – Bisbo, has recently released a finding which paves the path for all animation based content creators who are trying to ride this wave of demand for video content. They discovered that over 80% of their 10 million strong user base are adults between the ages of 18-44. Bisbo is India’s (and the world’s) first content producer that creates detailed news videos in animated format and has more than 1 million+ combined subscribers and over 100 million combined views on YouTube. Bisbo was awarded “Best Startup in Asia” in 2018.
Content industry also includes mixed medium industries like mobile-based short news creators and animation. While mainstream news has been giving space to scripted toons for long, few have used these as the main, storytelling medium. From left-side cartoon boxes in newspapers (Jug Suraiya and Lakshman’s common man) to 2-min, 3-D political capsules – these caricatures have had a curio value in newspapers and news channels. However, few have thought of how creatively these strokes convey a story, entertain and yet manage to leave their mark.
Told through the perspective of the company mascot, Bisbo, this covers hard-hitting issues like the pre-planning of the Pulwama attack never captured on video, to cricket wins, Bollywood to politics. “There is an increasing amount of 2D animation content for adults – one where the chosen topics resonate with them and their lives. Our chosen type of content is animated news, the merging of current affairs with a friendly format”, said Shakir Ebrahim, Founder of GoBisbo Broadcasting Network Pvt. Ltd. and creator of Bisbo when talking about the core of Bisbo videos.
“People today don’t have time for repetitive footage as in TV or the patience to read column centimeters of print. Bisbo’s solution for that is to present news and current affairs in animated format in such a way that viewers never get bored watching the videos and end up learning about something new every time they watch a video on Bisbo’s channel”, Shakir added.
The GoBisbo Broadcasting Network is making its mark on the realm of news and animation-based entertainment by combining these two ingredients to feed the digital appetite for video consumers in India. It breaks the mould of animation as a children’s medium by merging it with current affairs. This unique 3 year-old startup serves news in the form of scripted toons.
And the best part of the equation? They can never run out of content ideas, news is created everyday! As videos for Bisbo are based on the topics for the day, they have a steady source of information. The team takes topics from the events of the day, meticulously researches them and then prepares a script that is visually compelling, yet easily understandable.
The network is capturing a lot of users’ attention on YouTube. It regularly clocks a watch time of over 50 million minutes a month, on just 50 minutes of original animated content created in the same time period.
