Freedom and Flexibility are now the basic needs added to the usual food, clothing and shelter. Be it in professional or personal life, we always look for these two factors- freedom to express ourselves and flexibility to perform in a comfortable way. Anything that provides these two factors gains popularity; just like the digital media has gained tremendous traction in the recent few years.
YouTube has become the ‘go to platform’ for entrepreneurs who wish not to function as puppets under the hands of content commissioners or work according to the tune of rigid scrutinisers. Videogyan is one of India’s leading YouTube channels for kids with over 2.6 million subscribers and seven to eight million average views per day.
Started in 2011 by young entrepreneurs, Vishal Thatti and his friend Ranga Rao T M, the aim of Videogyan was to impart education to kids through visuals. Animation was the preferred medium as a lot of creativity could be induced. “Videogyan –as the name suggests, is about learning through media (“gyan” means knowledge in Sanskrit). Initially, we began creating e-learning content on YouTube in various categories including gadgets, music, business, finance, tutorials and e-learning content for kids,” says Videogyan, CEO, Vishal Thatti.
With a team of just eight to nine employees in the 2D department and 15 in the 3D department, Videogyan started making animated nursery rhymes for preschool audience. Their videos received over a million views and thus Videogyan started gaining popularity among toddlers and their parents. Today, it has around 75 employees creating content starting from conceptualising to final production of videos.
Nursery rhymes, short stories, puzzles, songs and playful animated content in both 2D and 3D form on Videogyan educate and entertain kids across the globe. Thatti explains, “Our entire content is created in-house. Right from scriptwriting, creating the animation, editing, production to uploading, everything is done by in-house artists and animators.”
Though based in the metropolitan city of Bangalore, Videogyan has a large portion of its audience base spread across the US, UK, Canada, Australia and different regions of India. The major revenue generation stems from YouTube with advertisements playing a key role to amass the revenues.
“Content creation used to happen only in the TV or the movie space in 2009. YouTube and other digital platforms created opportunities for other content creation players. We saw this opportunity and since we had the passion for content creation we pursued this medium,” adds Thatti.
On the advantages of online media, he says, “Online media platforms are better than television in terms of flexibility and freedom. We do not have any gatekeepers or restrictions. In TV you need to follow time restrictions and particular formats. Whereas in online, the time restriction depends on the length of content.”
Maintaining a high user base is a task as constant engagement with the audience is quite essential in online media. Fresh organic content and constant uploading keeps the audience interested and loyal towards a channel for there are multiple players in the market and the numbers are increasing everyday. “We are planning to create multiple series in multiple languages both in regional as well as international languages. We are working on multiple IPs as we tend to expand the age group of our target audience as well. Also, we are venturing in the mobile app space to make our content easily accessible to our audience,” he concludes.
