At YouTube, some make million$$ via own programming

Five months after celebrity anchor Glenn Beck walked out of Fox News in April 2011, his show debuted Monday (September 12, 2011) on online network GBTV with as many as 2.5 lakh viewers willing to pay $5 a month to be his audience. Observers say Beck would make $20 million in the first year of his online show - he apparently made $3 million a year at Fox.

“That is the power of internet today,” says Abhigyan Jha, founder and CEO, Undercover Productions Ltd, who, like Beck, hopes to bring television on the internet. Jha has scripted over 1500 episodes of various popular television shows over the years, and in the last two years has started creating Jay Hind, a full format television show on the internet exclusively for YouTube, Google’s video-sharing website.

A Mumbai-based housewife creates videos of her culinary skills and uploads them on YouTube. Cooking isn’t her passion, but creating videos is, with cooking being her theme. Thanks to the site, she can earn money as her viewership grows.

YouTube is embracing video content creators like Jha and several other individual video bloggers, media companies alike as partners, sharing its advertising revenues with them in a bid to grow its business in Asia, especially India, its largest market in terms of views and revenues.

It also makes sense because India is the second-largest content contributor on YouTube after the US.

To boot, Indian content is viewed 3 times more outside than in the country.

YouTube first launched the partner program me in the US in 2007, subsequently taking it across 22 countries.

Though the programme has been active in India for over two years in a ‘silent phase’, it was officially announced last week.
Once a video creator has been accepted to the partner programme, ads start appearing overlaid or next to their videos. YouTube then splits the revenue generated by those ads with the partner, with the majority of the share going to the partner.

The 100 million internet users in the country today spend an average of 16 hours a week online, YouTube estimates suggest. The average time spent on YouTube though is much less — about 23 minutes.

“There is an upside headroom for us to grow and get more share on the internet space. The more we expand the partner programme here, the more content we will have, resulting in more viewership on YouTube,” says David Macdonald, head of YouTube Content Operations, Asia Pacific.

For Amit Agarwal, India’s most popular tech blogger and known by the name Labnol on the social networking site Twitter, YouTube is the next best medium to reach out to his readers, who have been following his blog, but are now keen on video instructions.

Most of Agarwal’s blogging in the last seven years has been text-based. “But now, the consumption of information is happening over videos. People appreciate videos more than text-based content when it comes to reviewing of gadgets, for example,” he says.

YouTube claims that of its 20,000 partners worldwide, hundreds make $100,000 a year and thousands of partners make more than $1,000 a month.

Macdonald said the site has managed to make a few hundred partners in India already and many of them are earning more than an ‘average Indian salary’ through the programme.    
But if making money from creating and uploading videos was such a cake-walk, most of us would be living off of the $100,000 a year that YouTube is paying some of its well-performing partners. 

“You need content that is really good in order to get millions watching it. Creating a 5-minute quality video content can be a day-long job when you focus on aspects like sound, lighting, the overall experience you offer to viewers,”Agarwal says.

Macdonald says though most original content creators can apply to be a partner, it is essential that they have good content and a good number of viewers. And the number of viewers should ideally continue to grow. The number of clicks and likes on a video determine its success and in turn revenues it generates.

Jha’s show Jay Hind, for example, has television actor Sumeet Raghvan for host. His creative team is the same that made the popular television show Movers & Shakers. The cost to produce the show in this case is, thus, much higher and it will need millions of views to monetise the effort.

But he has confidence in the medium as he does not need to invest in advertising his content as opposed to broadcasters who pay a huge sum on hoardings to acquire audiences.

Another bonus is that he owns the content entirely and can choose to sell it to international broadcasters too at a premium. This kind of creative control on content would have not been possible had he been creating the show for a broadcaster.
“We are building a whole television channel on the internet,” Jha says.

About 48 hours of content is uploaded on YouTube from across the globe every day. About 40% of the site’s revenues already come from the partner program.

“India is growing faster than most of the markets. While the partner program last year grew 100% in revenues globally, in India the growth was 140%. Broadband penetration and access to video cameras with the masses are some challenges that we face but are also looking to address,” Macdonald said.

A number of small companies have taken birth in the last 2-3 years as a result of YouTube’s effort to grow Indian content.
Among companies looking at growing their niche content business through YouTube is Yoboho New Media that has created over 10,000 videos across various YouTube channels since April 2008. Starting with a channel Desimad, the company has grown to have nearly 30 channels on YouTube. Then there is 1TakeMedia, a leading distributor of short films, documentaries, animated content, and student films that has generated over 14 million views on YouTube through their 1,600 videos.

Macdonald says the way to cracking the Indian market will come through expanding in to other regions and building regional content in more languages.

The uniqueness of Indian content, he says, is the focus on educational content - the ‘how to’ theme, whereas in the US, for example, content on beauty or comedy is much bigger, and yet to establish here. Agarwal says content based on entertainment, news and niche interests are likely to find success. “The theme needs to be evergreen so that one continues to generate viewers.”Agarwal says.

Estimates on the size of the online advertisement industry swings from Rs 350 crore to Rs 1,000 crore. That compares with the Rs 11,000 crore that the television industry reels in annually.
The hope is, advertisers will get the drift.