YouTube ad co Channel Factory sees huge potential in India

“India is the fifth largest economy and for us not to be within this economy didn’t make sense. And digital spends for the first time are now overtaking the traditional, which means 2023 is the key year and the year we have chosen to launch in India,” Robin Zieme, chief growth officer – global, Channel Factory said in an interview.

From a global standpoint, India is a big market, with huge potential for growth, he said, both in terms of internet consumption and YouTube, as the projection for the next 12 months is 800 million active users from the current 400 million.

“Our long-term vision is to build India in such a way that it can power our global organization in a different way. India has the right talent too. India can also become another hub for us that can drive innovation and technology for us,” he added.

Yesudas Pillai, India lead for Channel Factory said, “The digital video market is about $1 billion in India. YouTube out of that is around $700 million. If we are able to get 10% of that market, it’s a pretty large market.”

The YouTube ecosystem has over 35 million channels; however, 20% of the channels actually contribute about 80% of eyeballs. Channel Factory’s API based on its status as the YouTube Measurement partner allows it to ping the YouTube ecosystem half a billion times daily to draw rich first-party data insights.

“We create a walled garden within YouTube walled garden, consisting of the top-performing channels, based on the various criteria we apply, be it viewership trends or sentiment analysis, content creator quality, metadata, keywords, and tags. Inclusions in specific plans are finally based on contextual relevancy, brand safety and suitability as well as performance. And this list doesn’t remain static for any campaign. It is always dynamic. So, you have videos coming in and going out based on KPIs guaranteed to clients,” Yesudas explained.

The company offers to its clients a tech layer on top of what YouTube currently does.

“It is not humanly possible for anyone to sit and look at 35 million videos and figure out what’s working and nobody else can replicate that technology. Two, we bring in operational efficiency. As we have built systems and processes and since it is a managed service, we take away the entire operations pain from agencies and clients and provide them with a live ViewIQ dashboard where they can see how their campaigns are performing in real time. They are putting their manpower resources to better use. And finally, financial efficiency. We have some early clients in India, who are pretty happy with the results so far and are continuing with us,” said Yesudas.