YouTube India is getting more serious in India, as it recently launched YouTube Kids and YouTube Gaming. Google is also making its own services in India relatively easier and more reachable to the people.
Starting today, YouTube users in India will see more local language content on Home and Trending. This means that if you’re an Indian who usually watches Hindi movie songs, or videos from AIB or The Viral Fever(TVF), or movie trailers, you will get to see more such content on your home page.
Based on your watch history, YouTube will automatically identify your preferred Indic language – from Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu – and display more content in that language on Home.
YouTube is going to see your watch history, and this is only if you have signed into Google, look at the videos you watch and in what language and suggest content on this basis. At the moment, existing users do get suggestions based on watch history, but the content volume will be higher according to the language.
If you think that YouTube has identified the wrong language for you, you can change your language. You can change the language on your desktop, Android smartphone and iOS devices by going through the steps listed on the help page here.
This move will allow regional content creators to reach out to their viewers more easily. Right now usually the promoted content and the most watched content gets highlighted on the home page, but now local YouTubers would get an upper edge.
Like every other change, this has two sides of the same coin. On one hand, local video creators can get their content out to Indian viewers, at the same time those who watch a mixed set of videos might not like the content being pushed out to them.
For example, if I prefer watching British YouTubers, but occasionally also watch Indian song videos, movie trailers and podcasts, I might get more Indian content that I don’t want to watch very often. There is always a trade-off in such things, but not a big one. I can always subscribe to the content I want to see.
This seems like a good idea on YouTube’s part to promote content based on view history and language preference. It will also give a chance to upcoming video creators in regional languages to get their videos out to a country of 1.2 billion people.
Source: Google
