Cashing In On Content

SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Rohan Sehgal started a social media account dedicated towards health and fitness. Sehgal had wanted to become a content creator, and he would upload content around subjects like intermittent fast­ing. But while it did reasonably well, Sehgal realised, it wasn’t exactly going to be the wild success he had imagined, and so, after a while, he pulled down the shutters on it.

Sehgal went on to start a luxury wedding invitations firm with his sister Aparna. But in his quiet time, he would continue going back to the drawing board, brainstorming different ideas and listing out the different parameters his new online content should follow. What Sehgal was really looking for was an idea for a new type of content that was different from anything currently available and that could instantly cap­ture attention.

Last year, he came up with an idea that checked all his parameters. It had a simple premise. Called The Sugar Spike Show, Sehgal would wear a continuous glucose monitor, and he would test different meals and drinks to check the blood sugar spike they caused in him. Following a set pattern, and created in a short and easy to understand format, with daily tests on popular meals and drinks consumed across or in some part of the country, which also occasionally lends itself to comparisons and heated debates in the comments section about which region’s cuisine is healthier than another’s, it is the kind of content that the internet loves. Despite catering to what is described a niche audience— one that is interested in health and the impact of food on one’s body—in just over a year, his subscriber and follower counts have shot up, to nearly 9 lakh followers on Instagram, over 2.5 lakh on Facebook, and over 2 lakh subscrib­ers on YouTube, with many of his videos routinely hitting over a million views. His audience also tends to be quite engaged with what he produces, often leaving comments and reactions, which is something not all viral content achieves. Sehgal had hit viral gold.

The format of his videos is also very attractive to brands. “Indians are not eas­ily trusting, and they are especially wary of marketing,” says Sehgal. “I don’t ‘tell’ my audience. I don’t even use adjectives. I ‘show’ its impact to them [by testing prod­ucts to blood sugar tests],” he goes on.

Sehgal represents a new wave of content creators sweeping through our social media landscape with creative and niche ideas. Influencers have been around for some time, but they usually tend to be a certain type, focusing on general trends or comedies, and focus on audiences in the larger cities. But as Indi­ans spend more time online, with reels and shorts supplanting everything else as their primary mode of entertainment, new types of creators are emerging from all walks of life, in urban centres and small towns and cities, creating videos on niche subjects, or catering to specific audiences, or whose calling card is their authenticity. There are farming influ­encers, those who make content around learning spoken English, cooking rustic meals, becoming a delivery professional, and a myriad other things. If you have a talent and a mobile phone, and some skill at presentation, you are likely to find some audience for yourself. Unsur­prisingly, brands are now increasingly tapping into these new types of creators.

One particular aspect to this is the growth of regional content and the growing demand for influencers from smaller towns and cities, whose fol­lower count will be infinitely smaller than those of the super-influencers in larger cities, but whose audiences will hail from a more concentrated locality and who will tend to be more engaged. A 2024 report from FICCI-EY estimates that India’s influencer marketing industry will expand from `19 billion in 2023 to `34 billion by 2026. According to the report, there will be a tenfold rise in the demand for regional influencers as brands aim to engage more effectively with consumers in smaller cities.

In Mohanpur, a village in West Bengal’s West Midnapore district, a 20-something Suprabha Bishayee, who was pursuing a hospitality degree then, was watching in anguish as his family’s finances were getting ravaged by the pandemic. His father’s sweetshop had to be closed, and their recently constructed house had to be sold off to clear their debts. “There was a little bit of money left after paying off most of the creditors, and I convinced by father to buy me an iPhone,” Suprabha says.

Suprabha had started a YouTube channel around his mother Usha’s cook­ing a few years before, but while that had never taken off, he wanted to give it a try once again, in the more viral-ready format of Instagram and Facebook Reels and YouTube Shorts.

The videos posted under the account “oldays_kitchen” became an instant hit. It was either the way she presents them, usually starting with a chhora or short rhyme about the dish she was about to cook, or her vibrant sari and personality, or the dish, or most probably a mix of ev­erything, that the videos began to go viral. She today has nearly 3.5 million followers on YouTube, over 1.5 million on Face­book and nearly 6 lakh on Instagram.

“My mummy is a housewife. She tends to be very shy. She doesn’t even go out on her own. But put her in front of a camera and her personality just comes out,” Suprabha says. The account has become so popular that a wide variety of brands, from the makers of smart­phones to food products, even those into makeup, tap into her popularity to sell their products.

The whole family has also pivoted around her newfound fame. Suprabha scripts the show, and often routinely also appears on it, the father helps out, and a younger cousin has been roped in to help with tasks like editing. They are also looking to expand, by hiring more professionals and opening a food estab­lishment under his mother’s name.

Some of the explosion in social media consumption across rural regions is also leading to strange phenomena. And there are few perhaps as unusual as what has transpired in Tulsi, a tiny village of an estimated 4,000 individuals, that lies a little distance away from the city of Raipur in Chhattisgarh. Dubbed sometimes as India’s “You­Tube village”, there were until recently at least a dozen YouTube channels here churning out short films in the local dialect, with at least half of the village’s 4,000 inhabitants featuring in these movies as actors.

It began in 2018, when Jai Varma, then a tuition teacher, and a friend, Gyanendra Shukla, started uploading short films of seven minutes or longer, on their channel Being Chhat­tisgarhiya. “We were looking to do something creative, and we were watching a lot of content in other languages on YouTube, but could not finding anything in ours,” he says. Those who worked on the channel later be­gan to create their own content, which they would upload on theirs, and before long, even an editing studio, set up by the local government, had come up in the village. According to some reports, as the channels began to attract more viewers, some of them even began to earn healthy sums of money. However, all this has died down in recent times.

Varma, who currently lives in Raipur where he works in social media and travels frequently to Tulsi, is looking to revive the channel. “Right now, I’m uploading clips from our old films on Instagram and Facebook. Everyone for some reason just stopped making content for YouTube. But I’m in touch with a few others, and hopefully, we will restart it once again,” he says.

The growth in regional social media shouldn’t come as a surprise. The category of content around farming, for instance, which has been around for sometime, is particularly huge in this segment. Darshan Singh, a content creator in this space who runs social media accounts un­der the name “Farming Leader”, with over 78 lakh followers on Facebook and 65 lakh on YouTube, is particularly popular. Between 80 to 90 per cent of his audience, he says, comes from Tier 2 and 3 cities in the Hindi-speaking regions of North India. He began the channel in 2017, when he realised how no content was being created for farmers, despite there being a lot of hunger for informative content that could help farmers in getting higher yields or dealing with farming is­sues. “Back then, I was trying to introduce organic farming in some of the farmlands my family owns. But when I looked for ideas or help online, I would find nothing that was useful,” he says.

Realising that there was an opportunity in this field, Singh began to travel widely across the country, looking for agricultural subjects and stories that would be of interest to farmers. Singh is today the go-to influencer for brands introducing anything new in the market for farmers, from the latest fertilisers to tractors. He also earns a significant portion from YouTube’s mon­etisation scheme and the products he launches under his brand name.

In recent times, after finding that the market for agricultural content is saturating, he has begun to diversify by tapping into his already large follower base to also upload international travel content. Indians from Tier 2 and 3 cities are increasingly travelling abroad, and Singh reckons that he could position himself as an influencer in this emerging field.

It is not surprising that brands are increasingly tapping into hyper-local influencers. These creators possess a large and engaged follower base in very specific fields that could be exactly what a brand needs at a certain point in time.

Munna Kumar Guddu, a Delhi-based delivery professional, for instance, produces content targeted specifically for the vast numbers of individuals who today work as delivery agents. His content that range from long vlogs to short reels from his day out in the field to videos where he explains hacks on how to earn more or register on certain platforms, draw a large number of delivery agents. “We don’t realise how big this whole sector is. Every year, more and more people are entering this field, and the number of jobs this generates is very big,” Guddu says.

Guddu, who has over 75,000 sub­scribers on YouTube, and equally large numbers on Instagram and Facebook, took to the job of delivering products for a popular food delivery service, sometime around 2015-17. Since he had a decent camera and audio set up, from the time he thought he could build a career by posting his music online, he began to use it to record content around delivering products instead.

TODAY, MOST OF his income comes from brands, especially new delivery services that are trying to recruit more delivery partners, or estab­lished players that want to promote any specific scheme. He still rides around the city delivering products for around two days every week, but he does this, not for the money, but to record content that he can put up online instead. “I spend two days recording content when I am rid­ing. But the rest of the days, I’m always at home, editing the videos, or writing the script for my content,” he says.

Back at Sehgal’s house in Delhi, where he has recently returned after a trip to Dubai, which he used to create a series of The Sugar Spike Show on popular dishes available there, he is talking about his fu­ture plans. There are the immediate plans for upcoming posts, such as special series on popular food items during Deepavali, the holiday season during Christmas and New Year, and New Year resolutions. And then there are the long-term plans with what he wants to do with his content, now that he has got a winner in his hands. The first year was all about creating value and trust. “The second year is going to be about diversification. We are going to do content around interviews with mem­bers of the community, about how they have implemented what they have learnt with the show; interviews with experts; and collaborations with individuals like chefs to create recipe videos for food that gives low blood sugar spikes,” he says. In the next phase, he plans to create longer-format content on YouTube, where he plans to expand the show to test blood sugar spikes on a larger cohort of people, across genders, age groups and ethnicity.

“The content space is booming, but brands are now becoming especially picky with whom to collaborate with,” Sehgal say. “They are looking at niche creators, and those whose videos get high engagement. So things are chang­ing there a bit.”

On a recent Saturday, Guddu seems to be in a relaxed frame of mind. He doesn’t have to ride that day, and he’s edited what he intended to earlier that morning. He admits he has it harder than most other content creators. “My audience is out all day, and when they get back home, it’s not like they can catch up on my content. They are usu­ally so tired that they’ll fall asleep the moment they reach home,” he says. “But over the years, many have come to know me, and in between short breaks, when they notice that I have put up something new, they’ll make it a point to watch it.”

Guddu’s most popular video was one which showed how he earned just `20 for delivering a parcel for a popular food delivery app. This video, which went viral and was also covered by various news outlets, is probably the reason, he believes, that has led to him not getting any promotion work from that app. But he doesn’t mind it, he says, since it got him many new followers. Another video that went viral shows a woman flinging a par­cel from the balcony of her house instead of handing it to him respectfully.

But he doesn’t mind that either.

“It is great content,” he says. n