Lines between consumer of a video and a creator are blurring on YouTube: Ishan John Chatterjee

For the last fifteen years, creators in India have turned to YouTube as a stage to share their skills and stories, in fact, a single storyteller can move an entire community, as per Ishan John Chatterjee, Director, India, YouTube.

Speaking at FICCI Frames 2023 on Wednesday, he shared the belief that the power of creator economy is coming off the cage today in India, and with the ubiquity of smartphones, cheap data and other emerging technologies, stories are travelling farther and wider than ever before and are being consumed by more people in deeply personal ways.

“Today, anyone with a mobile device can just create a video and they can review it and recreate it in different content formats and react to it as well. On YouTube, we are seeing that the lines between the consumer of a video and a creator are blurring,” he said.

In his view, since everyone is a creator today, there has been an explosion of hyperlocal communities and new content genres.

“From automobile enthusiasts in Kerala who care about public buses, to artists such as the Tetseo sisters who sing in tribal language of Chokri, to mental health communities and even to stay-at-home parents who are converting everyday household chores into helpful content, YouTube is helping take those niches mainstream,” he pointed out.

With this, he also emphasised that YouTube creators are helping Indians discover things, learn more about specific topics and are fuelling aspirations along with making a living for themselves through monetising on the YouTube Partners Program.

“These creative entrepreneurs are hiring people and are forming new businesses and this is leading to a ripple effect across the entire economy,” he stated.

Chatterjee also went on to cite that according to the latest Oxford Economic Study on the state of the creator economy, YouTube’s creative ecosystem contributed more than Rs 1000 crore to India’s GDP in 2021 and supported the equivalent of seven-and-a-half lakh full-time jobs. 

“Globally, in the last three years, YouTube has paid over $ 50 billion to creators and partners all over the world. In fact, in one calendar year, between July 2021 and June 2022, we paid up over $ 6 billion to the music industry and over 30% of that came from user generated content,” he stated.

Furthermore, he also said that in the coming future YouTube believes that the growth of the creator economy during the next phase is going to come from creativity and from new ways to make the creative community commercially successful.

“We’re working to make content creation across formats- whether it is VOD, Live, Shorts, Audio, etc. even more amazing so that our creators can find new ways to express themselves and build audiences,” he said.

As per Chatterjee, the top 1000 songs on YouTube Shorts, in January, had over 280 billion views globally. In December, last year, 6 million viewers across the world bought a channel membership on YouTube. 

“When it comes to commercial success, the digital behaviour of Indians continues to evolve and as more and more Indians participate in online commerce, new business models will emerge and when that happens, YouTube would continue to offer more opportunities for creators to monetise their content outside of ads- by expanding the subscriptions business, investing in shopping and by continually expanding our fan-funded monetisation, altogether,” he stated.