India's new YouTube celebrities are going well beyond urban audiences, with varied languages and content
Shruti Anand (centre) started her YouTube channel in 2011 as a hobby. Today, she and her husband Arjun Sahu, along with their family, run some of India’s top YouTube channels covering topics like beauty, lifestyle, cooking and kids
Image: Madhu Kapparath
(Note: Unfortunately, just a few days after this issue of Forbes India went to press, 107-year-old Mastanamma passed away. Our deepest condolences to her family and millions of fans around the world.)
Zoomed in: multi-coloured flowers, fluttering in the breeze; zoomed out: A green field, mud huts and a river in the background, a large, oval watermelon in focus. A wizened face with a toothless smile comes into the frame.
Mastanamma, as the small, grandmother-like figure is fondly called, wears a simple cotton saree, her hair in an oiled bun, and a mischievous glint in her eyes. She is cooking chicken inside the watermelon, using a traditional recipe and a simple coal chulha outdoors, speaking in Telugu that is translated into English subtitles. Mastanamma claims to be 107 years old, and lives in a village near Guntur, Andhra Pradesh. She has 1.1 million subscribers on YouTube—clocking up to 15 million views on each video.
Mastanamma’s fans are from Rajasthan, Pakistan, Canada, Colombia, Serbia, Mexico, Indonesia… the list goes on. Hers is the new face of India’s YouTube celebrity, steadily pushing past urban and linguistic borders and barriers. As India’s non-metro population gets increasingly hooked to mobile data and offbeat content, a new category of YouTube stars is emerging—and they are no longer just of the typically popular young-male-urban-comedian variety.
India has 390 million actively connected internet users. According to media research firm Comscore, 245 million Indians are active on YouTube per month. “This is thanks to two important sub-axes—language and place. Since 2015, we have seen massive growth in YouTube videos in South India, primarily in Tamil, Telugu and Kannada, and also in Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati,” says Satya Raghavan, entertainment head, YouTube India. Among YouTube’s top 10 countries, India is the fastest growing in terms of total and mobile device watch-time. A staggering 95 percent of video consumption in India is in vernacular languages. “There’s an obvious explosion of heterogeneous viewers, leading to a community of heterogeneous creators,” he adds.
“The obvious inflection point was the launch of Jio internet,” says Roopak Saluja, founder and CEO of content company The 120 Media Collective. “The moment you have consumers, an ecosystem of creators will be formed. The same content that’s popular in Mumbai or Delhi may not apply to the heartland, so we’re seeing more creators from different age groups and parts of India—and it is mind-boggling how quickly this transformation has taken place.”
There will be a huge rise, Saluja adds, in the number of YouTube stars from the heartlands in 2019. YouTube India is working to encourage this, with on-ground workshops and engagement support (training sessions on how to increase their engagement metrics with their viewers) in various languages. Besides, now brands can advertise in Bengali, Tamil and Telugu as well, “and we’re working on adding more languages,” says Raghavan.
Happy hours
With a comedy channel that only began in March 2017, 24-year-old Amit Bhadana has become India’s No. 1 YouTube creator, with 11.7 million subscribers, which is neck-and-neck with that of comedian Bhuvan Bam, who has 11.2 million subscribers. While Bam’s audience is mostly urban, Bhadana goes beyond cities.
A staggering 95 percent of video consumption is in vernacular languages
(This story appears in the 21 December, 2018 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)