As Google-owned YouTube becomes a foremost choice for streaming for most Indians as well as creating content, the tech giant is now in the process to monetise the platform in a big way, while helping the creator economy grow in leap and bound.
YouTube has now become the platform of choice for four out of every five people online in India while its short-video-making app called Shorts has grown in popularity, with 96 per cent aged 18 to 44 in the country using YouTube Shorts.
With an average of 70 billion daily views globally, YouTube Shorts continues to grow in popularity among viewers in India, according to the company.
In February, Google officially started ad revenue sharing on YouTube Shorts with creators to compete with Instagram Reels. Earlier, creators were only allowed to monetise long-form content on the platform.
Shorts watch-time now also surpassed devices with 88 per cent of online 18-44-year-olds watching short-form video content on a TV over the past 12 months in the country.
“In the 15 years since we launched YouTube in India, there has been an extraordinary all-round digital transformation, in connectivity and in content, and today, people have created a boundaryless viewer experience for themselves that straddles across their smartphones and their connected TVs,” said Satya Raghavan, Director, Marketing Partners, Google India.
Together with the total hours of content uploaded to YouTube by channels in India growing by over 40 per cent in 2023 compared to June 2022, 35+ adults averaged over 70 minutes of YouTube per day in that month.
As creators begin to tap gen AI for new ideas and audiences, the year has seen over 1.7 billion views of videos related to or using generative AI tools globally.
About 70 per cent of 18-44 year-old viewers online agree that they are open to watching content from creators that use AI to generate their content.
Google recently launched "YouTube Courses" -- a new way for creators in India to monetise their content while educating people.
YouTube Courses is an online medium to share learning materials in the form of videos. It will also incorporate PDF and other files for reference.
According to Google, the creator's economy of YouTube contributed Rs 10,000 crores to the Indian GDP in 2021 and simultaneously created 7.5 million new forms of employment.
Last year, YouTube announced a new programme that will allow creators to monetise their long-form videos with licensed music in 2023.
The company has introduced 'Creator Music', giving YouTube creators easy access to an ever-growing catalogue of music for use in their long-form videos.
YouTube Shorts has more than 2 billion logged-in monthly users, Google mentioned in its results for the second quarter (Q2) of 2023. This figure is up from 1.5 billion monthly logged-in users for YouTube Shorts announced last year.
Google also reported that YouTube brought in $7.67 billion in advertising revenue. This is 4 per cent higher than the same period last year.
YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.
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