Eight Schedule of the Indian Constitution lists 22 major languages being spoken by 1.32 Billion+ population. The list does not stop here, India has over 122 other languages being spoken in villages and 1599 languages spoken by the tribal people from the remotest part of the country. Indians are very much fond of regional language content and with Digital revolution, the reach and demand for regional content, especially in News category has gone up rapidly. Coming to YouTube landscape for News genre, all regional language news channels are killing it relatively in terms of views when compared with Hindi & English language news channel. Presenting a list of statistics for news genre videos on YouTube tracked using Vidooly’s Video Intelligence Tool using AI.

Regional Language News Channel on YouTube: Statistics

From the list of 290 different news channels tracked which also include channels in Hindi and English, 54.84% of channels belonged to Hindi, English, Telugu & Tamil. If we further give a breakdown of the Top 4 languages in terms of a number of active channels, Hindi leads with 33.45% followed by 9.66%, 7.59% & 4.14% from Telugu, Tamil & English respectively.

India is going to elections in 2019 and this can be counted as a peak season for all Indian news channels on YouTube until the end of the Marathon general elections in 2019. From now on politicians have started the preparation for 2019 and so are the news channels covering each activity and uploading each video slices to YouTube instantly. In order to dive deeper into the regional YouTube channels covering Indian elections, we need to know the current regional language distribution on YouTube’s platform.

Last 6 months viewership and Subscribers count clearly show news channels are clocking massive views on YouTube and list are majorly lead from the front by regional language content.

“Although TV leads by Viewership considering the Internet boom in India, every news channel wants to make its presence felt on the Digital Platform pretending to any Breaking News related to India”

Hindi channels account for 33.45% in count on YouTube for news category and account for 53.68% of total viewership on YouTube out of the total video views from top 4 leading language for news. Telugu accounts for 9.66% in count and has a viewership of 22.30% followed by Tamil with a 7.59% in count and 11.16% of total viewership. English News genre has the highest viewership and TRP rating in television but on YouTube, the viewership share is only 12.87% just behind Telugu.

Excluding Hindi & English which are spoken by a majority of Indian population, the list is majorly dominated by South Indian languages with Telugu leading the list followed by Tamil & Malayalam. Other regional languages with significant viewership include Gujurati, Kanada & Marathi. This clearly shows regional news channels are making their presence felt on YouTube and giving tough competition to majorly spoken languages Hindi & English.

This rise in awareness regarding the importance of an election in a democratic country has been a major reason for the growth of regional channel on Digital Platforms. Moreover, digital platforms like YouTube are also helping Indians stay connected with happenings in their hometown with all roads leading to 2019 General Elections.

The viewership data tracked by Vidooly Team would be very helpful for any brand/company looking to use this period to buy ad slots in news channels based on languages.

The data shared contains relative figures. For Vidooly YouTube Report with absolute figures reach us at marketing@vidooly.com or contact us at 8527863094.