Most watched videos: Indians flock to Youtube for music, Facebook for news

Key Highlights

• The most watched videos on Youtube are related to music and least watched are related to animals and pets.
• Facebook news videos are a hit with Indians.
• A total of 1.58 billion views were received for news related videos on Facebook.

Indians on Facebook have been flocking to the social media site for news updates while browsing the video sharing site - Youtube for music videos. 

“Indian internet users largely consume music content on Youtube and news content on Facebook,” Vidooly Media Tech said on Monday.

There are currently over 40 crore Youtube users in India and over 24.1 crore Facebook users.

“In order to understand India’s viewership habits, Vidooly tracked anonymous viewership habits of 641 million plus viewers between the ages of 18 - 65 on Youtube and Facebook across all platforms including desktop and mobile in September 2017,” the company said.

Youtube trends

After music videos the next most watched genre on Youtube was entertainment with 2.4 billion views followed by content for kids.

“Across the viewer behaviour surveyed across the top Youtube channels, music videos was a hot favourite amongst Indians with over 3 billion views followed closely by entertainment videos with 2.4 billion views. Video content for kids ranked third with 1.3 billion views in September alone,” Vidooly said.

The least watched genre as per the survey was videos related to ‘pets and animals.’

News and politics genre along with films and animation are not far behind the most watched content on Youtube.

Facebook trends

A total of 1.58 billion views were received for news related videos on Facebook in a month, the report said. The next most watched videos were entertainment related.

“Across the top Facebook pages and viewer behaviour surveyed, news videos was most watched with over 1.58 billion views followed in second spot by entertainment videos with 1.06 billion views,” the report said.

The least watched content on Facebook were sports related videos.

The independent content creators may be happy to note that their videos are given preference over food videos on Facebook.

“Undoubtedly, Youtube is India’s default music player and the most popular source for accessing music content. On Facebook however, news videos garner higher viewership compared to entertainment. We have witnessed a rising trend across music, entertainment and news videos as viewership and the average watch time across these platforms has grown by over 40% with growth primarily rising in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns," Subrat Kar, CEO of Vidooly.