iWorld
Regional news’ online viewership is billion-plus every month: Vidooly
MUMBAI: News genre is emerging in popularity across leading online video platforms in India and crossing a billion-plus online viewership every month.
Vidooly Media Tech conducted a study across top Facebook pages from India and YouTube channels from India, two of the most popular video platforms to understand viewership habits of Indian internet users.
Vidooly CEO Subrat Kar says: “Interestingly, we are seeing a rising trend of regional content dominating English or ‘Hinglish’ content. This points to the larger overall trend of increasing viewership and internet growth in non-urban areas. This presents an exciting opportunity for brands and content creators to create multilingual content to reach out to the millions of users to are accessing internet for the first time.”
The study was conducted across a total of 16 categories of Indian video content in the genres of automobile, comedy, kids, education, entertainment, film and animation, science and technology, health, gaming, how-to and style, food, music, news and politics, people, pets and animals, sports and travel.
With over 180 million users on YouTube and 241 million users on Facebook in India, they are the two of the most popular online video platforms in India. Both the platforms with its massive reach and ubiquity allow content creators, brands and anyone to reach millions of viewers who consume this content across desktop and mobile devices.
YouTube findings (across top 10 channels)
Music genre with 3.2 billion views and entertainment genre with 2.7 billion views attracted maximum Indian viewership. Video content targeted towards kids especially nursery rhymes were also extremely popular with 1.4 billion views.
Regional news is extremely popular on YouTube with nine out of the top 10 news channels publishing news in regional languages. Collectively, the top 10 news channels pulled in 701 million views. Most other viewed videos were across the categories of comedy, film and animation and food.
Facebook findings (across top 10 pages)
Unlike YouTube, news pips other genres to emerge the most popular category with Indian viewers with the top 10 pages pulling in collectively 1.4 billion in viewership. Here, the top spots are taken by Hindi and Marathi news channels. Followed closely are entertainment videos with 919 million views across the top 10 Facebook pages. In entertainment category, regional content again takes the top spot with content in Tamil, Kannada, Telugu and Hindi being extremely popular with viewers.
Regional trends
Across Facebook and YouTube, regional news across the languages of Telugu, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Marathi are extremely popular with Indian viewers collectively amassing 2.1 billion views in August across YouTube and Facebook.
Overall rankings
Across the top 100 channels in India on YouTube, content around music entertainment, news and kids’ genres took the top spots.
Across the top 100 Facebook pages, the top seven spots are dominated by news channels, followed by cooking and entertainment genres.
iWorld
Snapchat parent Snap cuts 16 per cent of workforce in AI-driven restructuring
The Snapchat parent is axing around 1,000 jobs and closing 300 open roles to save $500m, as artificial intelligence makes smaller teams the new normal
CALIFORNIA: Snap is snapping. The Snapchat parent has confirmed plans to cut around 1,000 employees, roughly 16 per cent of its full-time workforce, as it bets that artificial intelligence can do what headcount once required. Shares jumped more than 10 per cent in premarket trading on the news, a brisk vote of confidence from a market that has watched the stock shed about 31 per cent this year.
The restructuring, which also closes more than 300 open roles, follows pressure from activist investor Irenic Capital Management, which holds an economic interest of about 2.5 per cent in the company and has been loudly pushing Snap to tighten its portfolio and lift performance. The firm got what it asked for, and then some.
Chief executive Evan Spiegel told employees the cuts would reduce annualised expenses by more than $500m by the second half of the year. The company expects to incur charges of between $95m and $130m related to the layoffs, mostly severance, with the bulk landing in the second quarter. Staff in Snap’s North America team were asked to work from home on the day of the announcement.
The financial backdrop is not without bright spots. Snap expects first-quarter revenue to rise around 12 per cent to approximately $1.53 billion, broadly in line with analyst estimates. Adjusted core profit for the January to March quarter is forecast at about $233m, comfortably ahead of Wall Street’s expectation of $186.8m.
The harder question surrounds Specs, Snap’s augmented reality smart glasses subsidiary, which Irenic has urged the company to spin off or shut down entirely. The unit has absorbed more than $3.5 billion in investment and burns through approximately $500m in cash annually. Snap is pressing ahead regardless, with a consumer product expected later this year, even as Meta leads the market in the segment.
Spiegel is betting that leaner teams, smarter machines and a consumer AR play can restore Snap’s credibility with investors who have run out of patience. The redundancy notices have gone out. The harder restructuring, the one that requires a hit product rather than a headcount reduction, is still very much pending.
