Creator-led strategy catapults Qyuki past 5 bn views on YouTube & Facebook

Digital broadcast network and gency Qyuki, driven by a unique strategy of partnering with creators versus an aggregation or ‘owned and operated’ channel approach, recently surpassed over 5 billion views across YouTube and Facebook.

With a creator DNA in the founding team of Shekhar Kapur and AR Rahman and digital entrepreneur Samir Bangara, the company has created a clear leadership position in the market as a home for creators across the genres of Music, Pranks and Auto blogs while making headway in other popular genres.

The strategy has been vindicated by YouTube’s recent listof top ten fastest growing channels in the country that ranked Qyuki partners Sanam Band (Music) and FunkYou (Pranks) No.1 and No.3 respectively. The genre based focus of the company has also helped bring on board celebrated Bollywood and indie artists like Salim-Sulaiman, Clinton Cerejo, DhruvGhanekar and most recently Rabbi Shergill.

Its differentiated approach and successful track record in the space led to a recently announced partnership with YouTube to create one of the biggest digital properties in India called Jammin. Jammin will bring together some of the best Bollywood composers with the biggest YouTube stars of music. The show begins online and finishes offline with a massive live performance.

Beyond music the Company is home to some of the biggest Prank channels, a genre that is very popular with the 13-34 millennial audiences, with FunkYou emerging as the largest prank channel in the country across Facebook and YouTube. The group of four 19 year old boys has grown 1000 times on Facebook with more than 5.6 million fans amassed over the last 10 months and a following across the world with Cairo, Metro Manila, Lahore and Karachi forming part of their top ten cities of viewership.

While content is king, Qyuki believes that in the digital space technology can serve as a very successful ‘kingmaker’. Therefore it has built proprietary tools to spot and effectively market creators to their respective communities. The mix of technology, deep understanding in content, and marketing has helped win the confidence of several brands like Coca-Cola, Olx, VW, Moneycontrol and Mercedes, amongst others, to invest significantly with the company on branded content or as sponsors for Qyuki properties.