2 out of 3 Indians would rather give up TV than YouTube for a month said Google India’s Sanjay Gupta

Google held its annual marquee event Brandcast on 28 October where it revealed that YouTube in India now reaches over 325 million 18+ unique viewers month on month (as per Comscore, May 2020).

In his keynote, Sanjay Gupta, country head & vice president, Google India, said, “India is seeing its biggest content revolution and there is a fundamental shift in viewing habits with 2 out of 3 Indians saying that they would rather give up TV than YouTube for a month. Online video today is not just about entertainment but also experiences and learning and YouTube is playing the role of a catalyst in bringing this change.

Every day, millions of Indians are coming to YouTube to express their unique passions and create content that is more personal, helpful and accessible. YouTube today caters to the personal interest of a billion Indians across genres, languages, geographies and age groups, making YouTube the #1 platform for accessing videos in regional languages with Hindi leading the charts followed by Tamil, Telugu, Kannada & Bengali and others.”

A press note mentioned that over 2,500 creator channels had reached over one million subscribers and YouTube has seen over 45% growth in overall watchtime in July compared to last year for the same period (Comscore).

YouTube shared that watchtime of Platform gaming videos in India grew by 2x as compared to Q2 2019 and baking videos grew by 3x during the same duration. And with YouTube becoming an everyday destination for learning and education in India, Wifistudy with over 12 million subscribers and over 1.5 billion views is now amongst the most popular education channels in the Asia Pacific by subscribers.

According to a meta-analysis of 100+ MMMs conducted by Nielsen across multiple categories, it was concluded that YouTube now delivers 4.8X greater effectiveness than TV and impacts incremental sales.