YouTube is betting big on the Tamil market and intends to grow its business here in 2019. The online video firm will be focusing more on Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities next year. Satya Raghavan, director, content partnerships, YouTube in India, told The Hindu , cities like Coimbatore will be the next priority to scale up business.
Citing an example, he said, “If you look at this YouTube page, Village Food Factory, the creators are from a small town in Tamil Nadu. But their content is quite popular across the globe. Any content in Tamil has an appeal internationally,” he added. Without divulging into the revenue details, he said that the Tamil market is performing phenomenally well for YouTube and the market share has been increasing year on year.
YouTube highlighted that many trending moments of the year (2018) came from Chennai — from falling in love with village food recipes from Village Food Factory to the trailer of Rajinikanth and Akshay Kumar starrer 2.0 being the second most trending movie trailer of the year.
Additionally, Tamil pop music got the city grooving on Prabhu Deva’s Gulebagavali .
Village cook a hit
“Our Tamil creators and channels are in fact growing at a staggering rate across verticals such as learning, food, tech, comedy and music,” Mr. Raghavan said.
Village Cook P. Arumugam’s YouTube channel, which is the most sought among viewers, has over 2.2 million subscribers. His son, who shoots the video’s, said that through YouTube they were able to take village food to a global audience.
T. Kalaiarasan, founder of Black Sheep, which provides infotainment videos on YouTube, said there is a huge interest among Tamil audience for prank shows and political satire shows.
Subhalaxmi Parida, who started Cheeky DNA, said people come to her page for humour-related videos.
“My target audience is family and women in specific.” she added.
