Indian YouTube channels with 1 mn subscribers up from 16 to 1,200 in 4 yrs

Education & learning was the high-growth vertical for YouTube in 2018; this year, it is gaming

The number of Indian YouTube channels with more than one million subscribers has grown from 16 in 2015 to over 1,200 now. The video-streaming platform expects similar growth over the next few years, with a rise in the number of internet users in the country allows more people to use video as a medium to create and share content.

"There are more than 1,200 channels across verticals with more than 1 million subscribers in India. Of these, over 120 are owned by women creators. YouTube has more than 265 million people coming to the platform on a monthly basis, and we see a lot more growth promise in the next couple of years," said Satya Raghavan, director for content partnerships, YouTube.

The company has organised ‘YouTube PopUp Space’, an event where users learn more about content creation through workshops. It is also organising a NextUp gaming event, where 12 chosen gamers will be trained on basic, intermediate and advanced levels of gaming creation. The company started seeing more content creation in regional languages around 2015.

The company saw growth in education and learning videos in 2018, and gaming in 2019. Every year, there are some verticals that grow and help sustain the momentum, according to Raghavan.

Last year, there were 30 channels with more than 1 million subscribers that were creating content in Tamil. In just about a year, that number jumped to 94. Last year, there were more than 630 channels with more and 100,000 subscribers; this had gone up to 1,250 channels now, he said.