India is an important market for YouTube and it will continue to influence their strategy, India director Ishan John Chatterjee said at Moneycontrol Creator Economy Summit on October 31.
“Our journey as a platform has mirrored India’s own digital transformation and the growth of the creator economy. We are very focused on making sure that we are the best platform for our creators,” Chatterjee said.
YouTube recently completed 15 years in India and counts the country as one of its biggest markets with over 400 million monthly users. India has also been a key market for the Google-owned video-sharing platform to pilot features before expanding it across the world.
“Some of our recent launches have come to market working specifically towards the Indian users. A good example is our short-form video service YouTube Shorts. India was one of the first markets where YouTube Shorts was launched since we are a mobile-first country with many young people who increasingly have smartphones in their pockets,” Chatterjee said.
He said that short-form video as a category is also helping democratise access to not just consumption but also to creation.
YouTube’s expanding base of creative entrepreneurs contributed over Rs 16,000 crore to the Indian GDP in 2022 and supported the equivalent of 7,50,000 full-time jobs in the country, according to a recent consulting firm Oxford Economics.
While mobile devices continue to dominate usage on YouTube, Chatterjee said that living room screens have been the fastest-growing surface in India for the last five years.
“As fixed-line broadband improves and the cost of smart TVs continues to drop, we expect that what happened with mobile devices will also happen with living room screens,” he said.
Chatterjee is also betting on the latest AI advances to make it easier for creators to make content and maintain its position as a preferred platform for them.
In September 2023, YouTube unveiled a suite of generative artificial intelligence (AI) products and tools targeted at creators.
This includes the ability to create AI-generated video or image backgrounds for their short videos by just typing an idea into a prompt, helping creators come up with new video ideas, find music tracks for their videos and reach new audiences through features such as automatic dubbing.
“AI is going to help us connect our creators to newer audiences. We recently announced an AI-powered dubbing tool Aloud. It is not available in India as yet but it is coming. It is a priority for us,” Chatterjee said.