3.1 million subscribers.
In the video posted on the channel, Arumugam, a lean, gray-haired, often cooks a lot of food around the waist. The 58-year-old resident of Tirupur, India, used a “100 chicken legs” to make a dish with a video view of 61 million. Arumugam’s son, Gopinath, was originally a filmmaker in Chennai, but later established the channel in mid-2016 due to his failure to return to Tirupur. The number of people who started watching was very small, but the father and son have been persistent.
Gopinath’s wife, Pragathi P, will also help with the video. She revealed: “We later decided to take a video of his cooking a whole goat, and the result was 3 million views in 3 weeks.” The family earned from YouTube from the initial monthly rate of INR 3000. It has increased to about 100,000 rupees per month (about 10,000 yuan).
The 37-year-old Madhura Bachal lived in the United States. After her daughter was born, she resigned from the bank and established her own YouTube English cooking channel. In 2016, Bachal added her native Marathi version to this channel. She bet on the Marathi recipes and received a generous return. It took her English channel 10 years to attract nearly 900,000 users, but the Marathi channel Madhuras Recipe Marathi received 1 million users in just 18 months. She said: “Video ratings for traditional recipes are high.”
When Bachal founded the Marathi cooking channel 2 years ago, Kuber Natarajan of Bangalore also began publishing children’s songs and stories that he had originally sold on CDs in the South Indian language. Natarajan, a 43-year-old engineer, said that the number of InfoBells subscribers he created with his wife, Jayalakshmi, has grown four to five times between 2016 and 2017. Today, the number of subscribers to the InfoBells channel in Telugu and Bengali is ranked in the top ten of the two languages. Their income has increased by 25% year-on-year, and Natarajan plans to launch more Indian languages and start selling peripheral products and publishing original story books.
