At the YouTube Brandcast event in India, Neal Mohan put the success of YouTube Shorts in perspective. During his pitch to potential ad buyers, the YouTube CEO revealed that the platform’s answer to TikTok has accrued more than one trillion views in India alone.
Mohan boasted about YouTube’s unparalleled presence on the Indian subcontinent. “YouTube is number one in reach and watchtime in India. We just passed a huge milestone,” Mohan said. “Shorts, which we first launched in India, now has trillions of views here.”
To understand the magnitude of that achievement, some context is necessary. YouTube Shorts gets billions of views in the U.S. as well, but its Indian traffic has been supercharged by the South Asian country’s national TikTok ban. The ByteDance-owned app has been unavailable in India since a 2020 crackdown targeted nearly 60 apps from China-based companies.
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In India’s post-ban social media landscape, millions of users flocked to TikTok alternatives like YouTube Shorts and Instagram. Certain categories saw particularly noticeable upticks: In our Global Top 50 rankings, family-oriented hubs have regularly ranked atop the standings. Anaya Kandhal, who recently celebrated her third birthday, has topped our monthly Top 100 for four consecutive months. In July, young Anaya and her family took in 4.29 billion monthly views. No other channel crossed the three billion view mark.
Sports content has also shined among India’s Shorts community. During his Brandcast spiel, Mohan noted that cricket videos have counted 50 billion views over the past year.
American sports content is already growing on YouTube, and if the government’s proposed TikTok regulations persist past ongoing legal challenges, another big bump will surely follow. The lesson from YouTube Shorts’ post-TikTok rise in India is clear: If U.S. users lose access to the embattled app, YouTube Shorts stands to gain trillions more views.
Top Indian creators like Anaya Kandhal post bigger numbers than any other channels in the world, but Mohan also noted that the country’s YouTube community is spread out and diversifying. At Brandcast, he revealed that there are 11,000 Indian channels with at least one million subscribers apiece.
