YouTube unveils India's first pop-up space in Hyderabad

In a bid to support the growing community of local language video creators in India, YouTube launched its first pop-up YouTube Space in the country yesterday. Setup at Ramoji Film City in Hyderabad, the pop-up space will act as a hub for video creators, offering everything from training to hands-on workshops to networking with other members of the YouTube community and industry veterans.

"India has a dynamic content creator ecosystem and we are excited to bring the benefits of YouTube Space to creators in emerging creative talent hubs like Hyderabad through a pop-up format which is the first-ever in the country," Lance Podell, Global head of YouTube Spaces said.

The pop-up hub comes as viewership of regional content on YouTube platform has tripled over the past two years. "We have been very focused on the Hindi audience and Hindi creators over the last couple of years with Mumbai as the hub. This is the first opportunity where we are experimenting what creating content is like for YouTube creators in another language and culture in India" said David MacDonald, Head of YouTube Spaces for Asia-Pacific.

While the Hyderabad space is the first in the country, YouTube has held similar pop-up spaces in cities like Jakarta, Seoul, Bangkok, Manila, Miami and Mexico City among others.

MacDonald said they are going to learn from the feedback they receive from this pop-up space, understand the needs of the local creator community and experiment with the format in future rollouts in the country.

YouTube has 1.5 billion logged in users every month around the world and 1 billion watched hours every day. In India, it has 180 million people watching videos on mobile alone every month.