After tickling the funny bone of millions of viewers with a slew of content from American and British creators, during two themed 'Weeks', YouTube’s third seven-day spotlight went live from September 5 to 12 with YouTube India Comedy Week, an event that features new videos from India's prominent funny people.
Objectives
Comedy as a genre is big for YouTube globally, with 7 out of 10 of the most popular channels being based on comedy.
Through the creation of channels with content curated and commissioned by YouTube, the website is possibly working towards the creation safe-areas for advertisers.
The Indian Comedy Week has also drawn attention from both Indian and American audiences, thanks to the presence of some of the country’s biggest comedy stars, including Vir Das.
Execution
The programme, with approximately 400 hours of curated content, was launched in collaboration with Indian content producers and featured a range of content that included the best comedy scenes from Bollywood, all-time favourite TV comedy shows, such as The Great Indian Laughter Challenge, Comedy Nights with Kapil, MTV Bakra, etc, the best of Indian mimicry, and Indian regional language comedy content in Marathi, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati and Kannada.
Some of the partners which produced brand new content include Nirvana Digital, Jay Hind TV, TheViralFever, and NH7, and the week featured over 35 new YouTube channels with standup comedy from Cyrus Broacha, Vir Das, VIP, Saurabh Pant, Sugandha, Bharati, Krushna, Raja Sagoo, among others.
The Indian comedy videos were housed on the official YouTube India homepage, which has over 300,000 subscribers.
As part of its marketing campaign, YouTube released two video ads for Comedy week, each a duration of 45 seconds, featuring Cyrus Broacha and Sudesh.
Strategy
By introducing this initiative, Google is clearly developing YouTube as an alternative to Television. The endeavour is not about TV reruns, which in any case would not have generated enough buzz.The fact that YouTube is willing to commission content and is allowing producers to retain the rights indicating how serious it is about pushing for new content on the website.
After giving viewers a taste of the kind of Indian content being showcased during its recent Geek Week, the new Comedy Week represents a clear attempt to continue overseas expansion.
What was in it for partners?
With YouTube marketing, Comedy week and the featured content on this channel, partners essentially got free promotion for their comedy content during the course of the week which the partners would have otherwise had to pay for heavily by placing ads through Ad Words.
Going by past experiences, the online comedy show JayHind.tv was very successful. It completed 250 episodes on February 23, 2012. Launched on August 15, 2009, JayHind.tv was produced by Undercover Productions and anchored by Sumeet Raghavan. The biweekly Late Night Comedy Show recorded an average of 1.5 lakh views per day.
YouTube has 55 million unique visitors every month and 40 percent of them use the service on mobile phones so the number of people this endeavour will reach is huge . The way people consume content has changed dramatically and this is why the timing of YouTube India Comedy Week is just right.
A dash of humour provided by some of the biggest names in Indian comedy was just what worked to build a strong brand YouTube India.
Just in case you missed the funniest videos in YouTube Comedy Week, watch this video to refresh your memory!
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