Chennai-based ChuChu TV hits top slot with 17.5 million subscribers

ChuChu TV's biggest strength is its dominance in the pre-school space on YouTube.

Chennai-based ChuChu TV Nursery Rhymes and Kids Songs, an online channel for pre-school kids became the biggest in this segment on YouTube with 17.5 million subscribers earlier this year.

Its eight channels offer four languages – Tamil, Spanish, French and Portuguese. Their total number of subscribers is over 25 million, up from 14.3 million last year, according to Vidooly, a video intelligence firm. It is now, after T-Series and Sony Liv, the third most subscribed YouTube channel in India and among the 100 most subscribed globally.

Vinoth Chandar, co-founder, chief executive officer and creative director, explains: “Most of the numbers are from YouTube because Roku, Amazon or other platforms don’t give statistics.”

Even if they did, the fact is that more than 80% of the traffic for ChuChu TV comes from YouTube. Every strategic investor who has checked it out worries about its ability to scale beyond YouTube, online and beyond pre-school children.

As a reference, they point to the Rs 37.8 billion revenue of Viacom18, which has a robust kids business on television with Nick, Sonic and others which develop characters such as Motu-Patlu. Till last year, these TV characters were bringing in more than a fifth of the traffic on its video app Voot, plus revenue from consumer products featuring them.

ChuChu TV’s biggest strength is its dominance in the pre-school space on YouTube. This puts it in a good spot in the Rs 119 billion digital advertisement market which Google, YouTube’s owner, dominates. Usually, it shares half or more of the revenue YouTube generates with content creators.

But, this also exposes ChuChu TV to the vagaries of the Google algorithm, which could change any day. Since BARC, the TV rating agency in India, doesn’t measure pre-school viewership separately television is not a viable alternative in an ad-driven market.

ChuChu TV’s founders spent the better part of last year addressing some of these issues. In December 2017, it launched a subscription-driven video app that has had 500,000 downloads globally, claims Chandar. It continues to add subscribers from Canada, Australia and the US.

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