With the improved internet connectivity across the length and breadth of India, YouTube’s users in India has only increased. In April 2019, YouTube hit 265 million monthly active users in India, its largest market in the world. Estimates by experts peg the total internet users in India to be around 400 million, which means that nearly 67% of the population uses YouTube every month.
This large audience is content hungry. For a lot of Indian users, searches begin on YouTube instead of Google. People learn about new things from YouTube, not from news channels. The younger generations look at YouTube for entertainment, instead of looking at
And that brings me to the ever-increasing creative uses people are coming up with for YouTube. Here are some of them:
Education: With a free-to-upload platform like YouTube, teachers have been able to reach students that they would never have been. Channels like WifiStudy are using the platform to conduct live classes. They inform students to join a live session at a specific time and teach new concepts. Why is this different from other education platforms? Here, the teachers have an advantage to practically create content and make content available for free. With the number of people using YouTube, it is always going to have a lot of people looking for videos.
Life archives: Videos of special events in life are best shared on YouTube. Once something is uploaded to YouTube, you don’t have to worry about storing it and preserving it. Eg. marriage videos. Today, a lot of people choose to upload their wedding videos on YouTube directly - thus enabling them to share the videos easily and have them right in their phones, whenever required.
Motivation: Personal motivators are using YouTube to spread welfare messages, provide professional and personal guidance, thus allowing people to progress faster in their lives much faster in their lives.
Getting away from ‘books’: What used to be contained in books previously is now contained in videos. Video and audio content is powerful and easy to create these days, thus allowing people to narrate entire books and upload them to YouTube.
Audio content / Podcasts: The world looks at apps like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc. for listening to podcasts. They look at audio apps like Spotify, Youtube Music, etc. to listen to audio. In India, creators prefer to go to YouTube first, primarily because of the distribution. While audio content is not optimized for YouTube, creators re-purpose their songs and audio content to suit YouTube. Often, people play a stock video while their audio content is playing.
These are the obvious ones to spot. The next time you look at YouTube, think about the creative ways it is being used in. If you find something that surprises you, do let me know!
Next week, I will write about WhatsApp. For a lot of the first-time internet users in India, WhatsApp is the introduction to internet. I’ll write more about this.
If you liked reading this article or didn’t, do reply and let me know!
Thanks for reading :)
Hemant