Attracting over a billion viewers every month and creating global stars like Psy, YouTube is a major force in today’s entertainment and social media world. The world’s largest video website owned by internet giant Google is one of the few platforms where almost anyone- from indie artist, cranks and pranksters to music labels and film studios- can upload their work for the world to watch.

India, as an emerging economy with increasing Internet connectivity is an important market for the site. Of the 72 video hours uploaded globally, India accounts for the highest upload in Asia and the third highest in the world. YouTube gets 37 million unique visitors every month from India.

Although it is yet to launch its pay channel to India, it is very much in the radar. Radioandmusic.com caught up with Google India’s country head marketing, Sandeep Menon for an update on how the site is faring in India.

Excerpts:

Has YouTube seen a significant increase in numbers of users for India (and globally) with the rapid penetration of smartphones and allied Internet based technology?

Smart phones and mobile phones in general are s powerful Internet access medium. In India, there are about 90 million mobile Internet users - and this base growing faster than the PC internet user base – in fact the next 200 million internet users that come online will be mobile only in India. In India, for YouTube over one third of the traffic comes from mobile phones. This is phenomenal given the penetration of smart phones is still low and 3G connectivity on mobile is still not seen as affordable.

How important is entertainment- and music, specifically- as a segment for YouTube in India? How healthy is the market in terms of growth, users and ad revenues?

Music by far is the biggest category on YouTube followed by entertainment. And there are growing really fast. In India, we offer a huge portfolio of songs and almost all leading TV shows from the top broadcasters on YouTube. In addition to this, we are also seeing emergence of professionally produced made for web content and we see all the three growing.

Having thousands of clips on site, how does YouTube(India) check for any illegal and copyright infringement regarding music videos and film songs. What is YouTube’s stand on the issue?

YouTube has a longstanding commitment to copyright management. We strongly believe that we will succeed if our partners succeed. So besides using the state of art technology called Content ID we also

. Terminate accounts of repeat infringers

. Prevent re-uploading infringing files through MD5 hash technology

. Offer copyright holders an easy Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) batch takedown toolCustomer Voice Portal (CVP).

With the Content ID solution, we wanted to make it easier for partners to discover where their content is being used on the site

. Identifying full and partial usage

. Giving rights holders a choice on what to do: block, monetize or track

. We spent tens of millions of dollars developing Content ID

Content ID is a scalable, automated system that understands relationships between rights holders, and gives content owners the ability to track all rights associated with any piece of content on YouTubeanywhere on the planet

. Content ID scans over 100 years of video every day

. More than 3,000 partners use Content ID, including every major US network broadcaster, movie studio and record label

. We have more than eight million reference files (over 500,000 hours of material) in our Content ID database; it's among the most comprehensive in the world. The number has doubled in the last year

. Over a third of YouTube's total monetized views come from Content ID

. More than 200 million videos have been claimed by Content ID

Regarding the site’s deals with music labels and production houses for songs and music: Can you give us a brief about the general contents viz. revenue sharing, copyrights and duration?

Ours is revenue share model based on advertising. We share majority part of the revenues with content creators. Copy right management details are shared above.

How important is YouTube sensations like Dhanush (or Psy at the global level) in popularizing the site? Has YouTube undertaken (or planning) any initiative to discover and promote young talent especially in the music world in India?

YouTube is all about creativity and participation. Take music - our community not just watches a video, they cover parody, remix, dance along with it alongside entire networks of fans.

. One of the biggest videos of the year was the Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez cover of 'Call me Maybe' that set off a trend of covers and    parodies. From the Harvard Baseball team to Olympic teams on their way to London.

. There are thousands of remixes, remakes, and parodies of this video.

. It's more about the creative culture it inspired than it is about the video itself.

We are a platform where users watch, share and engage and enjoy the videos they like, if the content is good, it usually goes viral on the site - there are any examples like that in India too. With over a billion users worldwide,YouTube is a great place to find many talented content producers - we focus on offering our users a great video watching experience.