Pushing the Next Level: Investigating Digital Content Creation in India

Strategic Approaches to Labor

The strategies creators adopt with respect to their creative labor reflect the multifarious nature of labor in the online content creation space. Our interviewees stated that their creative digital labor is spread across a variety of digital platforms, indicating no strong preference for one platform over another. When asked about the different approaches to publishing content across various platforms, comedian Sorabh Pant replied that “Everything is almost becoming each other . . . it’s all merging into one . . .” As platforms add new features, such as Facebook’s live video or YouTube’s status update features, creators are becoming more platform agnostic, preferring to increase presence across a spectrum of digital platforms and cross-posting certain content. This illustrates a growing trend toward cross-platform strategies, as has been noted elsewhere (Burgess and Green 2018).

Independent online creators explained how they split their daily activity between traditional creative labor, such as writing, rehearsing, and performing, and digital media labor, such as posting, responding to comments, and sharing others’ content. Frequently posting on social media is an important part of building and maintaining audience engagement. Sorabh Pant explained his posting habits on social media as follows: “Twitter probably about 10 times a day, Facebook about 6 times a day, Instagram and Snapchat about 6 times a day, and YouTube is about once a week.” There is a significant pressure on the part of online content creators to consistently post content on social media in order to keep up the engagement through comedy sketches and memes that are low investment but are likely to resonate with their audience.

Maintaining such an active online presence keeps creators involved in ongoing discussions and aware of moving trends, not to mention previewing or advertising upcoming content. In addition, interacting with fans makes up a portion of creators’ online activity. As pointed out by Brahma Raval, “I also acknowledge [my fans] by liking their comments . . . Besides I also chat with people, accept their friend requests, so on an average I spend an hour with them.” As creators’ popularity grows, however, interacting with each individual fan can quickly become prohibitively time-consuming.

Tanya Chamoli, who posts her dance videos on YouTube, explained that audiences play the most important role for creators, more so in some ways than the platforms themselves. Social media have enabled fans to feel closer to creators through direct communication, like direct messaging on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter, or by creators sharing snippets of their daily lives through stories on Snapchat or Instagram. For digital creators, especially obscure creators who built their following from the ground up, audience engagement is critical, as Sorabh Pant reflected, “The next level is to engage with them a lot more because I think [we] honestly owe something to them.”

Multitasking is also a regular occurrence for online content creators who prefer to stay behind the camera. Dhruv Sehgal, senior content creator for Pocket Aces, recalls his impromptu acting debut: “We were making a video for Dice Media [Pocket Aces’ long form content YouTube channel] and one of the actors did not turn up and hence I was asked to do the role instead.” Pocket Aces is a digital entertainment company that runs three YouTube channels that produce short form, long form, and food-oriented content. Collectively, the three channels have amassed over one million YouTube subscribers. The ability of firms to take risks and engage their own personnel on screen is both emancipatory and cost-efficient. Shifting roles allows creators to attend to audience preferences and capitalize on unexpected opportunities for creative labor.

Frugality is key to sustainability and success with short form content, as Anirudh Pandita, co-founder of Pocket Aces, explains, “In the short form you are watching for five minutes having a laugh and sharing it with your friends and going back to what you were doing. That is the method of consumption.” Pandita was also quick to point out the ways in which Pocket Aces deploys meme culture to attract audience attention: “Our Content team creates content quickly through memes . . . we use [memes] as an experiment . . . does this joke work?” By strategically posting content at specific times and across specific platforms, the Pocket Aces team can capitalize on the fast-moving format of memes, without needing to invest significant time for maximum audience traction. As Pandita further explains, popular memes, short form content, and on-screen cast member dynamics are repeated in a broader context through long form content. In this way, Pandita and Pocket Aces can minimize risks by recreating successful ideas or jokes with different characters. This kind of strategic use of short form content illustrates a dynamic approach to testing for popularity and ascertaining the viability of longer format content.

Creators must also be strategic when competing for attention online. They must be cognizant of viewers and create content that can be easily circulated through different communities. According to Pandita, the first step is understanding how each of these platforms helps reach viewers:

We came in at a time when YouTube’s front page was completely algorithmically run, the treading was algorithmically run. So, we said, if I put a video up on YouTube, how will I get it to count? How do I get it to be discovered? . . . The actual discovery was done on Facebook and not YouTube . . . We went for Facebook first . . . and the sharing started getting us the initial virality.

This strategy was corroborated by Nidhi Bisht, Creative Director of The Viral Fever (TVF), who emphasized that TVF’s strategy was to build a community on Facebook first and then use YouTube to build a subscriber base among fans and brands. Online creators are not only using a combination of platforms to extend reach but are also prioritizing them depending upon the life cycle of their content or channel. Facebook, as a platform, is more conducive to creating communities, whereas YouTube promises better remuneration but may limit the prospect for discovery.

Streaming services also provide more avenues for additional revenue through creative labor. The three comedians we interviewed each mentioned additional writing work they do to supplement their income. One interviewee pointed to the promisingly expansive digital market for professional comedy writers. Comedians may connect with a broader audience of organizations through their body of digital work. As Aditi Mittal commented, “I am spending more time on thinking [of] ways to translate online, which was not the case earlier. Now, I am thinking of ways to put this [content] in the form of tweet or a picture, or a video, in a direction that is freer.” Translating content, writing copy, and cross-platform integration offer opportunities for more revenue streams, but may do so at the cost of dividing creators’ attention and devouring time that could otherwise be spent on other professional work. This leads to our second theme developed through interviewees’ repeated insistence that they were not “just YouTubers.”

Professional Identity

In addition to strategic approaches to their labor, the independent content creators expressed a desire to cultivate a specific professional identity. Interviewees again pointed to utility of digital platforms to construct their online identities, because, as Aditi Mittal explained, “social identity is a new currency.” Many of our interviewees were adamant that “online content creator” was not how they identified themselves. As Sorabh Pant emphasized, “I describe myself as a comedian. The rest of it is all just other stuff.” Brahma Raval, who produces primarily video content, acknowledged his dual role as a digital content creator as well as filmmaker. Tanya Chamoli acknowledged that content creation was a job, albeit not her primary job: “I am a choreographer, performer, and a freelancer. YouTube is my part time job.”

Independent creators indicated that online content was just “other stuff” that they could use as a “calling card” for other nondigital creative work. Certain creators we interviewed wanted audiences to sample their work via digital media to encourage further exploration into their larger bodies of work. This challenges Craig and Cunningham’s (2019) assertion that social media is a repository for nonlinear open sharing of amateur content creation while digital media remains the hub for professionally generated content.

As an example of how creators used their online content to popularize their other work, Tanya Chamoli remarked, “I am not here to [make] money, but rather to showcase my art.” Showcasing art does, in many cases, lead to potentially lucrative opportunities, as demonstrated by Aditi Mittal, who released a Netflix comedy special in 2017. She explained, “I have got tons of work because of the stuff that I have put online . . . it’s kind of a CV, a glorified video CV, on things that I have been doing for the past seven years.” Comedian Atul Khatri described these “digital calling cards” as tools to reach out and boost ticket sales for his live comedy shows. Brahma Raval, who creates regional Gujarati content, reflected that streaming services were a launching pad for his larger professional aspirations: “My objective is to produce a film. If I get good budget, I would definitely like to create a good Gujarati film.”

Another aspect of developing professional identity is the ways in which digital platforms empower creators to use their personal experiences for digital storytelling. For example, Dhruv Sehgal developed a show for Pocket Aces based on his own life experiences, called A Delhi Boy, Now Living in Mumbai. He went on to create Little Things, a series that loosely follows the everyday life of a couple living in Mumbai. Stories like these reflect the significance of the medium in defining the contours of contemporary Indian life. Sehgal’s approach to online content as a storyteller’s medium illustrates creators’ liberty to express their identities realistically online. Moreover, the success of Little Things is not limited to YouTube alone. Its second season was recently acquired by Netflix and a Little Things book is contracted to be published by Penguin Random Book House India (Vikas 2018). In addition, the two lead actors in Little Things have since been cast in feature films according to Anirudh Pandita. The varying degrees of success enjoyed by independent content creators and the show Little Things exemplifies the power of the online content to derive new meanings from identity, help creators cross over to other platforms and reward the individuals involved. Another marker of the increasing power of online content is the recent rise of brand partnerships and “quasi-corporate structures” in the digital content landscape.

Quasi-Corporate Structures

In articulating the dynamic ways in which online content creators perceive and use streaming media services, we discuss the organizational practices of individuals and start-ups encroaching in streaming online media. We operationally define these encroachments as “quasi-corporate structures,” which refer to online content creators engaging in activities reminiscent of “legacy media” corporate structure but differing in media-management practices. Companies such as TVF, AIB, Pocket Aces have grown into their own factions through content creation on YouTube and are now functioning as full-fledged production houses. This offers competitive advantages over independent creators in online screen media markets.

Associate Creative Director for TVF, Nidhi Bisht, highlights another quasi-corporate structure, which he terms a “creative corporate structure” deployed to pitch and develop ideas:

We have a Creative Corporate Structure. Let’s say I have an idea which I think has the potential, the first thing I will do is . . . bounce it in the room and there would be like-minded people who think that the idea has the potential. So as we bounce the idea and 10 jokes come up and we see writers getting excited for this . . . then we say, yes something can be done on this . . .

This creative corporate structure echoes a fundamental attempt to decentralize the traditional corporate hierarchy and change the ways in which ideas are pitched and developed in Indian film and TV industries. An open corporate environment that emphasizes sharing ideas from all levels is reflected in the corporate structure of another digital media company, Pocket Aces, as co-Founder Anirudh Pandita notes:

The company is actually based on some of our core beliefs of culture. So, we always put culture above everything else. You saw the office; it is pretty open. There is no cubicle, so it is a free atmosphere. Because there is a lot of belief that the interdepartmental disciplinary skills will bring out content and ideas.

While some independent online creators may view these shifts toward more formalized production as a threat, others see apparent benefits. Quasi-corporate structures in the online content creation space help launch careers, develop new ideas, and deliver high quality content. Creators use these structures, in concert with strategic approaches to labor and carefully crafted professional identities, to take full advantage of new creative affordances of digital media platforms.

Regional Content

We observed a growing demand for regional content to serve populations that have been largely ignored by mainstream Indian content producers. Atul Khatri reflected on the rise of regional content in India:

One thing that we have seen in the last year [2016–2017] is that Hindi stand-up comedy has come out in a form of very different level and a very expositional level. It has reached out to the audience which we, as English stand-up comedians, couldn’t reach out to . . . I think it is here definitely to stay and I am expecting to see more and more regional comedy.

Relationships with regional audiences was another aspect of constructing professional identities, as described above, that is supported through online content creation. Creators sustain ties with their localities by producing content that appeals to various regional ethnic groups in India. Streaming platforms act as seamless distribution channels that are crossing boundaries and amassing global audiences (Lotz 2017), or in the case of India, highly diverse domestic audiences. Indian content creators can exploit gaps in the market with targeted regional content, as does Brahma Raval who produces Gujarati-language content aimed at a highly specific market segment in India.

Region-specific content also caters to certain audience segments outside of India. For example, Sunil Nair, COO of AltBalaji streaming media service, observes that AltBalaji’s Tamil-language web series can cross mediascapes (see Appadurai 1990) to be viewed in neighboring regions with Tamil-speaking populations, such as Sri Lanka, Singapore, and Malaysia. This phenomenon has also allowed regional content creators in India to create exciting and more palatable stories for transnational audiences who speak similar languages. This perception among streaming platforms has provided emerging vernacular content creators (Burgess 2006) a new platform to engage and focus on storytelling rather than adapting to the demands of dominant Hindi-language markets. Furthermore, this has also questioned the definition of mainstream or regional content on the basis of language. Nabh Gupta, Indian marketing manager for Amazon Prime, explains that a Hindi-language content would be treated as regional in Tamil Nadu, where a majority of the population speak either Tamil or English. This hyper-localized approach to regional content allows online creators to cater to the diversity in India and its surrounding areas.

Challenging the Hegemony

While there has been a hegemony on the part of the conglomerates, the democratic access to media (Jenkins 2006) has also enabled independent creators to create content that can genuinely threaten the established major powers in the digital space, long enjoyed by the likes of Netflix, Hotstar (Star venture), and Voot (Viacom18 venture). For instance, India’s top YouTube creator, All India Bakchod (AIB), was hired by Hotstar to create a multilingual comedy show entitled, On Air with AIB (P. Sharma 2017, 1). The strategy of the newly launched VoD service, Hotstar, at that time was to engage millennial audiences and attract them to their platform. Besides leveraging their audiences, AIB was willing to collaborate with Hotstar as it could provide a platform to harness their creativity for commercial success. Media businesses invest heavily in marketing content, but it is often creators’ brands that benefit the most. TVF, a popular YouTube channel which now also has its own VoD platform, was conceived through a lack of enthusiasm in television channels for parody content. This prompted the TVF team to launch their channel on YouTube, later becoming the first original content YouTube channel in India to amass one million subscribers in 2015. In an interview with online news portal Your Story, the founder of TVF, Arunabh Kumar confessed,

Luckily Canon camera, YouTube and my rejection came at the right time, and all three of them coincided . . . Qtiyapa [a TVF show] is a show I had conceived for MTV. That show also got rejected after a lot of resources went into it. That was one of the best rejections in my life, else we wouldn’t have Qtiyapa with us . . . (Dwivedi 2013, 1)

The availability and free access to technology enables creators to realize their visions, as opposed to being stymied by the traditional creative process in Indian film and TV industries. Despite this, it is still quite possible for large media firms to take credit for the success of shows that are developed, filmed, and produced by online content creators due to the unequivocal power relations of larger platform and economic capital. Kumar describes this as “creative feudalism” where a handful of creators would make all the decisions (Fleming 2016, 1).

Moreover, the effects of disruptive innovation in new media have challenged the “closed-door” operating practices of traditional mediums. Visible effects are evident on traditional mediums, such as Bollywood which is notorious for rampant nepotism (Punathambekar 2013), but has slowly begun to recognize and accept emerging voices from new media economy in order to stay relevant with the changing sociocultural consumption practices. Thus, well-established hegemonies of Bollywood, previously synonymous with the film and TV industries in India, may also be threatened.

As we note above, avoiding the hierarchic structure of Bollywood industry is a benefit of adopting quasi-corporate structures. This extends to challenging the Bollywood corporate culture through the ways subordinates in online content firms are treated. There is an element of trust and confidence that firms like Pocket Aces and TVF afford their employees, which our interviewees explain is rooted in start-up culture. This distinguishes work culture in online content firms from Bollywood and the Indian TV industry. As Anirudh Pandita describes, “[Television executives] are not courageous enough to let young people make content. That is the structural difference between us and them . . . We have the courage to hand over the company to a young person and say ‘Go, run this, go make the content.’” Employees at all levels are given greater latitude to engage in tasks, pitch new ideas, and help keep pace with rapidly moving online culture.

Turning from the work culture to the creative content, many of our interviewees noted that despite their varying levels of fame and success, they must still fight for visibility in the shadow of Bollywood. A principal means of cutting through the noise is to avoid Bollywood-style content altogether. The established conventions of Bollywood film culture, designed for mass commercial appeal, appear “rigid” and “reductive” to creators working in the digital space. According to Aditi Mittal, Bollywood movies fall short in nuance and subtle presentation, giving independent creators a chance to fill gaps with innovative, niche, and sometimes risky approaches to content and storytelling.

Online content creators can exploit audience fatigue with Bollywood’s famously highly production values and predictable storylines. As Dhruv Sehgal comments, “Hardly anyone is interested in watching a car flying. People are more interested in knowing about the show story, the characters, and their interplay.” Online content creators operate on a shoestring budget compared with any given Bollywood production, yet the successes of online content, like the above example of Little Things, speaks volumes to the value of putting a strong story ahead of production value.

For smaller communities in India which are newly connected to the web, digital content creators may be first through the door offering content that uniquely represents their region or ethic group. Even though the Bollywood stars are still at what Atul Khatri describes as “a god kind of level” in the eyes of their devoted fans, dedicated fan bases are steadily growing for many independent and collective digital content creators. Sorabh Pant attributed this to a shift in media consumption, as a younger generation flocks to the Internet:

I think consumption patterns are changing and young people are changing with it. And I don’t know if it’s going to be on the same scale but it’s going to be pretty close. Like I’ve seen the kind of insanity that goes down whenever some big YouTube star is touring everywhere.

Bollywood, and its massive audience, is certainly not going anywhere, but our interviewees exemplify how online creators can survive and thrive in India either independently, together as quasi-corporate companies or production houses, or through partnerships with popular online platforms. What remains uncertain, however, is how online creators will mitigate or overcome the lingering challenges that plague the creative industries in India and beyond.

Censorship

Despite the success stories we have described above, our interviewees were wary of the persistent specter of censorship in India. Freedom House (2017, 1) ranks India as having “partly free” Internet pointing to several instances where the Indian government has impinged upon or outright restricted Internet freedom. The report details instances of the government temporarily suspending mobile networks, enacting laws that enable government surveillance of users, and making arrests in connection with content shared online. As Sorabh Pant put it, “You have to toe the line a little bit more in India than you would ordinarily in the West.”

Online creators in India are in a unique position compared with their film or TV counterparts regarding government censorship. Indian law dictates that the Internet is a censorship free medium. Films in India must be certified by the Censor Board of Film Certification (CBFC) and television content is subject to retrospective censorship by the Broadcasting Content Complaints Council (BCCC), set up by the Indian Broadcasting Foundation (2018). However, the High Court in India has, for the time being, reinforced freedom of expression online in India.

The majoritarian euphoria around the uncensored web in India may be short-lived as the Bombay High Court recently sought replies from the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Union Ministry of Electronics and Technology against a public interest litigation (PIL) filed over the “obscene and vulgar” representation in the content streaming on Netflix and AltBalaji (Mangure 2018, 1). The Court’s decision will have far-reaching effects on the online content creators as the PIL seeks to set up a pre-screening committee for the content produced on streaming services. This is just one recent example of how the Indian government is beginning to mobilize new policies to regulate expression online, the ramifications of which may lead to digital content creators following in line with the Indian film and television industries. It is worth noting that none of our interviewees mentioned any specific examples of having to take down content or pay fines as a result of government censorship laws.

On the contrary, one interviewee pointed to cases in which she self-imposed censorship to avoid cultural taboos or controversial topics in India. Aditi Mittal recounted instances when she was wary of telling jokes that might portray her family or parents negatively, as well as an outpour of negative and abusive comments that were posted to a video in which she joked about feminine hygiene products. In both cases, her material would not be removed for contravening any censorship laws, but it would still be cut to avoid toxic audience backlash: “You will receive death threats to say what is wrong with you, so you have to be very careful.” This leads to a second important challenge facing online creators in India: gender inequality.

Gender Inequality

Aditi Mittal was the only interviewee to raise the important issue of the challenges female Indian creators face online. As she explained, “Most trending content right now is just misogynistic bullshit . . . and I have no idea what the shit is that but still, it is trending.” In her view, the Internet in India largely consists of boys and young men, which explains why sexist content performs so strongly while female creators are frequently disparaged and attacked online. Similar to creators creating regional content, Aditi Mittal uses her content and comedy in an attempt to address a highly underserved population Indian women. This illustrates a struggle of female content creators working as “aspirational laborers,” characterized as those who produce “authentic” content built on relationships and entrepreneurship yet receive disproportionate compensation while also conforming to gender stereotypes and social inequality in the online media industry (Duffy and Hund 2015, 9).

Sexism online is not unique to India; however, cultural taboos and norms have prevented messages of gender equality and empowerment from entering the mainstream until recently. According to Kay (2018, 37), “internet comedy has come to be a social imperative by a generation of Indians, which speaks to a wider project of challenging Bollywood and the emerging discourses around gender, discrimination, politics and the media as pressing and pertinent.” Aditi Mittal’s comments reaffirm this important point, but other interviewees did not speak about this issue. Future studies should examine how female content creators, not to mention LGBTQ+ creators, in India perceive, address, and combat gender inequality and sexism online.