Indian vernacular languages are increasingly receiving attention from many directions. YouTube is the latest to join the race as it has seen that there has been a spurt in the volume of content in Indian languages such as Tamil, Marathi, Bengali and Telugu and the company expects this to increase by a whopping 40% in the coming year.
According to an Economic Times report, Marc Lefkowitz, head of YouTube Content Creator and Artist Development for APAC, has said that within the Asia Pacific region that he controls, India is the fastest growing market for YouTube. And they have seen that not just Hindi and English, but many regional languages appear to be becoming popular multiple times.
From an overall pan-Indian perspective, YouTube has seen that there are 245 million users accessing YouTube each month and a third of these hail from the non-metro regions. Another remarkable statistic Marc Lefkowitz shared is that there are 300 video creators in India who have crossed the landmark of 1-million subscribers. The figure was just 16 in 2014. And it is only expanding with 3 creators joining this rank of 1-million and above subscribers each week. And there are 2500 India-based creators whose videos get viewed by 1000 or more subscribers.
Another aspect brought out during this interview is that as much as 90% of those accessing and watching YouTube videos in India do so from their mobiles, a figure even they found interesting since it conveys the expansion of the mobile market and the availability of internet connectivity throughout the country. These are phenomenal by any yardstick. YouTube stands committed to the Indian market and will stay focused on making things easier for the users to create content and upload them while those accessing the content will also receive due attention.
YouTube has also come up with what are called pop-up centres in India. The first one is in Hyderabad and the second one has recently been opened in Delhi-NCR. These centres allow free access to users to create videos and production equipment is provided at these centres with the other necessary paraphernalia to help them create content and upload on YouTube. They call it the “Learn”, “Connect” and “Create” model and is a global initiative.