Video has to be the best-kept secret in India with over 232 million active internet users we have a huge appetite for video consumption. Last time you visited your Facebook timeline chances are that over 60% of the content that you would have seen would be videos. So what has been fueling the rise of video marketing in India?
Video Marketing: The Mobile Indian
India’s mobile phone subscriber base crossed 1 billion users as per data released by TRAI in January this year. YouTube the countries largest video platform claims that 55% of its videos consumed in India are from mobile devices. Earlier last year YouTube launched offline feature to enable users to watch videos offline a move that was put into action to make sure that even the slow internet users can download and watch videos later. Facebook is also said to testing offline feature for its video as per reports that have recently surfaced on Bloomberg.
“Video has been an integral part of content consumption for years now. But with the new formats of short videos in Instagram and Snapchat the space is seeing some awesome distruption. Good examples are Kate Hudson and DJ Khalid on SnapChat.”
Rituraj Bidwai, Digital Marketing Consultant
You have a platform; we have the content!
T-Series channel on Youtube reached 11 million subscribers earlier this year and had been adding over 8,000 subscribers daily. T-Series is not the only creator who has seen a massive uptake regarding numbers and revenue from the platform. ChuChu TV, an education channel on YouTube creating rhymes and content for kids, has over 5 million subscribers and adds over 7,000 subscribers daily.
YouTube Partnership program on an average contributes 55% of the revenues to contributors, and estimates suggest that top channels could be earning anywhere around $50K to $1 million from Youtube alone. Not surprisingly if you think the numbers don’t add up then, you should know that the top ten channels on YouTube each have over 1 billion views or more on their content as per Live Mint report. Of course making it into the top #10 is going to be a hell of a task if you knew that top 8 out of 10 channels are into the business of media & entertainment and are owned by large conglomerates.
“India is one of the biggest consumers of videos in the world today, with over 5 billion views every month. From being a YouTube dominated to a new generation of independent content creators and aggregators, the industry has come a long way and promoted the art of story telling on digital platform towards brand building in a significant way”
Saumya Agrawal, Associate General Manager, Vizeum Media Services
A country that never sleeps!
India is the second largest market for YouTube & Facebook. Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report 2016 pointed out that India was either #1 or #2 MAU (Monthly Active Users) for Global Internet Leaders. We clearly are a country that never sleeps, and with 37% growth in internet users, year-on-year India is at an inflection point. With over 65% traffic coming from mobile devices it’s pretty evident that consumer internet brands need to focus on video marketing & content marketing on mobile as a driver for growth.
Emergence of Dark Social
Both Facebook Messenger & Whatsapp have over a billion users each. When it comes to sharing, private messaging already dominates, with almost 70% of all online referrals coming from dark social. Estimates indicated that over 250 million video messages get shared on Whatsapp daily. If we add private browsing and e-mail to the list, it’s easier to predict that the amount of video content consumed from dark social has to be mind boggling. Video marketing using dark social is an area that marketers still trying to understand.
“People do think in Stories and not in statistics and hence you can see growing use of videos in Facebook and other social media. A powerful example of story telling is the come back of Maggi in India with the Ad Mummy Bolo do na 2 minute.
Having said that, the traditional Advertising media is here to stay no matter; many of us trying to drill it back to ROI and relevant other measuring challenges associated with it. I foresee technology just as an enabler in the overall Advertising game. Fundamentally its easier for the consumer to relate it back to a story and a compelling emotion associated with it. “
Ajeesh Venugoplan, Founder, Servosell
Race to be the dominant video platform
When it comes to video search, YouTube seems to be the undisputed leader in India with over 70 million users and over 1.01 billion views recorded monthly. Facebook has made tremendous progress in pushing video as the format of choice with its 122 million active user base in India, but there is no published data specifically for India to understand how the medium is doing for the platform. Every another platform seems to be playing a catch-up game with YouTube, for instance, Vimeo only has about 5 million users in the Asia Pacific, Netflix has recently launched its operations in India and Amazon also launched Prime in India which gives members access to video content.
Lastly, if you had to understand how users are consuming video content numbers from YouTube India will come in handy.
