Mumbai: At its marquee annual event Brandcast, YouTube announced that with its unique and diverse content catering to the personal passions of millions of Indians, YouTube in India now reaches over 325 million 18+ unique viewers month on month, as per Comscore (May 2020). Underlining the content revolution that is unfolding in the country, YouTube shared that authentic and personable creators are churning out rich and even more diverse content categories like learning and education, platform gaming, food recipes, farming and beauty across regional Indian languages.
In his keynote, Sanjay Gupta, Country Head & Vice President, Google India, said, “India is seeing its biggest content revolution and there is a fundamental shift in viewing habits with 2 out of 3 Indians saying that they would rather give up TV than YouTube for a month. Online video today is not just about entertainment but also experiences and learning and YouTube is playing the role of a catalyst in bringing this change. Everyday, millions of Indians are coming to YouTube to express their unique passions and create content that is more personal, helpful and accessible. YouTube today caters to the personal interest of a billion Indians across genres, languages, geographies and age groups, making YouTube the #1 platform for accessing videos in regional languages with Hindi leading the charts followed by Tamil, Telugu, Kannada & Bengali and others.”
With over 2,500 creator channels now reaching over one million subscribers, YouTube has seen over 45% growth in overall watchtime in July compared to last year for the same period (Comscore). YouTube shared that watchtime of Platform gaming videos in India grew by 2x as compared to Q2 2019 and baking videos grew by 3x during the same duration. And with YouTube becoming an everyday destination for learning and education in India, Wifistudy with over 12 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion views is now amongst the most popular education channels in Asia Pacific by subscribers.
YouTube also shared how this content revolution has just not resulted in growth for creators, but today both large and small advertisers are leveraging the platform to drive business results and create unique collaborations with YouTube creators helping brands get better returns over TV. According to a meta analysis of 100+ MMMs conducted by Nielsen across multiple categories, it was concluded that YouTube now delivers 4.8X greater effectiveness than TV and impacts incremental sales.
Talking about it’s recent campaign on YouTube, Rashi Goel, Director Marketing and Consumer Communications, Nestle India Ltd. shared how they tapped into consumer interest in recipes that were easy to cook at home during the lockdown. “We worked with the Google team to combine the power of brand Maggi, the trust and engagement enjoyed by YouTube creators and the reach of YouTube. We did a channel takeover of the top 106 food channels on YouTube in India and the results exceeded expectations, reaching over 120mn unique users at the precise moment when food was top of mind for them.”
Speaking about how Times Internet leverages YouTube, Satyan Gajwani, Vice Chairman of Times Internet, said, “We have gone from using YouTube as a digital equivalent of TV to drive brand awareness in the past to now using YouTube’s growing reach to serve our marketing goals across the funnel – s from driving customer awareness to building brands, and even moving the needle on key conversion metrics across our businesses Last year, we used YouTube to drive viewership of our new show called “Queen” on MX Player, we reached over 78 Mn unique viewers who ended up spending 600 Mn minutes watching the showWe have also tapped into the learning focused audiences on YouTube for live classes on Gradeup, our test preparation platform. For ETMoney, we collaborated with YouTube creators to drive interest in personal finance and as a result reached over 22 million people using the content created with YouTube creators, and our brand searches grew by over 160% after the campaign.”
Concluding his remarks, Sanjay Gupta, added, “We are thrilled to see that with our strong reach across the country and high levels of engagement across an unparalleled variety of content, along with the ability to personalize at scale, YouTube today delivers more value to businesses than ever before.”
