MUMBAI: News genre is emerging in popularity across leading online video platforms in India and crossing a billion-plus online viewership every month.
Vidooly Media Tech conducted a study across top Facebook pages from India and YouTube channels from India, two of the most popular video platforms to understand viewership habits of Indian internet users.
Vidooly CEO Subrat Kar says: “Interestingly, we are seeing a rising trend of regional content dominating English or 'Hinglish' content. This points to the larger overall trend of increasing viewership and internet growth in non-urban areas. This presents an exciting opportunity for brands and content creators to create multilingual content to reach out to the millions of users to are accessing internet for the first time.”
The study was conducted across a total of 16 categories of Indian video content in the genres of automobile, comedy, kids, education, entertainment, film and animation, science and technology, health, gaming, how-to and style, food, music, news and politics, people, pets and animals, sports and travel.
With over 180 million users on YouTube and 241 million users on Facebook in India, they are the two of the most popular online video platforms in India. Both the platforms with its massive reach and ubiquity allow content creators, brands and anyone to reach millions of viewers who consume this content across desktop and mobile devices.
YouTube findings (across top 10 channels)
Music genre with 3.2 billion views and entertainment genre with 2.7 billion views attracted maximum Indian viewership. Video content targeted towards kids especially nursery rhymes were also extremely popular with 1.4 billion views.
Regional news is extremely popular on YouTube with nine out of the top 10 news channels publishing news in regional languages. Collectively, the top 10 news channels pulled in 701 million views. Most other viewed videos were across the categories of comedy, film and animation and food.
Facebook findings (across top 10 pages)
Unlike YouTube, news pips other genres to emerge the most popular category with Indian viewers with the top 10 pages pulling in collectively 1.4 billion in viewership. Here, the top spots are taken by Hindi and Marathi news channels. Followed closely are entertainment videos with 919 million views across the top 10 Facebook pages. In entertainment category, regional content again takes the top spot with content in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi being extremely popular with viewers.
Regional trends
Across Facebook and YouTube, regional news across the languages of Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi are extremely popular with Indian viewers collectively amassing 2.1 billion views in August across YouTube and Facebook.
Overall rankings
Across the top 100 channels in India on YouTube, content around music entertainment, news and kids' genres took the top spots.
Across the top 100 Facebook pages, the top seven spots are dominated by news channels, followed by cooking and entertainment genres.
