YouTube launches India's first pop-up Space in Hyderabad

Hyderabad: To support the growing community of independent YouTube creators, YouTube on Thursday unveiled its first pop-up YouTube Space in the country, here.

Set up at Ramoji Film City from October 5-7, the pop-up format will empower an emerging breed of young local language YouTube creators to provide richer more engaging visual content across genres.

Built around the "Learn," "Connect" and "Create" model of permanent YouTube Spaces, the pop-up format is an investment focused on the development and growth of content creators across the country, Lance Podell, Global head of YouTube Spaces said.

"India has a dynamic content creator ecosystem and we are excited to bring the benefits of YouTube Space to creators in emerging creative talent hubs like Hyderabad through a pop up format which is the first-ever in the country," he said.

In the last 10-12 months over 50 independent creators in India have hit the milestone of 1 million subscribers and thousands of creators have hit 1,00,000 subscribers mark, he said.

"With ever growing Internet user base in India, YouTube presents a tremendous opportunity for emerging language creators to succeed on YouTube and we remain committed to investing in their success," he said.

On the first pop-up YouTube Space launched in the city, Lance said over the next three days, 700 creators will get an opportunity to advance their digital and business skills, with classes on video production, building an online business, and an opportunity to network with established and popular YouTube creators in India.

According to David Macdonald, Head of YouTube Spaces Asia Pacific, the amount of content uploaded to YouTube in India has grown by 95 percent.

"India is a very strong market for us world-wide and among the top 10 markets in terms of user engagement and watch-time. Right now our mobile watch-time growth in India is 400 percent year-on-year and 85 percent watch-time (viewership) comes from mobile devices," he said.

YouTube already has a permanent YouTube Space in Mumbai located at the Whistling Woods campus. Since its launch in 2015, over 7500 creators have visited the Space and produced over 500 videos that has generated 100 million views, he said.

"We have nine permanent YouTube Spaces in our global markets," Lance said adding a total of 45 pop-up Spaces are being conducted in 21 markets this year.

YouTube has 1.5 billion logged in users every month around the world and 1 billion watched hours every day.

In India, YouTube has 180 million people watching videos on mobile alone every month.

Reacting to a query on porn content, Lance said, "It is a big issue and it's not an issue exclusively to India. It's an issue the company takes very seriously and every day we are getting smarter and better at managing on how to remove the content that gets posted and teams of people are on that job specifically to deal with it. We are committed to that and are developing products and technologies in addressing it. It's an evolving process".