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The Chu Chu Mantra: Here’s how one of YouTube's most successful channels made it big
By Delshad Irani on November 4, 2017
The Chu Chu Mantra: Here’s how one of YouTube's most successful channels made it big
By Delshad Irani on November 4, 2017

Kids’ YouTube channel, Chu Chu TV’s most popular video to date is ‘Johny Johny Yes Papa’. It’s got about 1.5 billion views and is Google-owned YouTube’s 44th most watched video in the world. But there’s another Johny on YouTube who is sneakily eating sugar and just 387 million people have seen him so far.

When Chennai-based Chu Chu TV released this version of the popular nursery rhyme, it received some of the worst reactions the channel’s co-founder Vinoth Chandar ever read. Parents, mostly from the US, which is Chu Chu TV’s primary market, were horrified when they saw Johny, his siblings and Papa share the same bed. Chandar tells us he can’t even repeat some of what the viewers had to say. It was a matter of cultural difference. “I mean, my wife, my two kids and I, all sleep in the same bed,” he says, still a little shaken by the reactions to the video. Nevertheless, without skipping a second, Chandar and his co-founders – BM Krishnan, Subbiramanian TS, Ajith Togo and Suresh Bhoopathy – went back to the drawing board and gave the little sugar-addict his own private bedroom.

From the beginning, the creators of Chu Chu TV have taken on board every piece of constructive criticism from viewers – parents and pre-schoolers (including the founders’ kids), who are the channel’s target audience. “Chu Chu TV is one of the first in the space to actively engage with parents,” says Aman Dayal, content partnerships, YouTube Kids & Learning, South & South East Asia at Google. In fact, based on one parent’s request on its Facebook page, the channel even created a Chu Chu TV theme birthday party for her child.

Constant reviewing of its own content and engagement with parents, the gatekeepers, is what took Chu Chu TV from an obscure private channel started by a father (Chandar) to amuse his toddler (a little girl he fondly calls “Chu Chu”) to one of YouTube’s biggest success stories internationally. And it got there with just 161 videos uploaded since 2013.

The Chu Chu Mantra: Here’s how one of YouTube’s most successful channels made it bigOver the past five years, the Chu Chu team, Chandar and the channel’s creative head Krishnan, all hard-core “IT guys” who found a second career as children’s song writers and animators, took traditional favourites (most of them have rather dark origins like wars, slavery and plagues) and rewrote them to reflect a positive outlook and a new world order. In Chu Chu TV’s version of the controversial classic ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’ there are white and brown sheep. ‘Chubby Cheeks’, Chu Chu TV’s maiden video that got over 300,000 views in just two weeks, was rewritten to emphasise the importance of a lovable personality over fair and rosy cheeks.

In the reboot of a numbers video a line about a toy gun was dropped after complaints poured in from parents in some western markets. The original video is still on air though because Asian parents seem not to mind a weapon popping up here and there in a pre-school rhyme. These updated nursery rhymes are all delivered in bright, colourful 2D animation set to almost Bollywood-style “dhinchak” music, as YouTube’s Dayal thought when he first saw Chu Chu TV videos. The kids love it and parents love anything that constructively occupies their offspring long enough to finish a few chores and watch some Narcos or GoT.

Chu Chu TV certainly hasn’t toiled in vain. It ranks No1 in APAC and No2 worldwide in family entertainment and pre-school education category (based on number of subscribers). In India, only T-series and entertainment channel SET India have more subscribers. In the list of the Top 100 most subscribed YouTube channels worldwide (2017), Chu Chu TV sits at 37. Almost 80% of the channel’s 14+ million subscribers are outside the country. But India has emerged as No2 after the US.

Dayal also credits the founders’ knowledge of digital, how to build audiences on YouTube and do good quality metadata, for Chu Chu TV’s unprecedented global success. But we all know who the real hero is. Chu Chu or Harshita is now 6 years old and often reminds her father, where the credit really lies. Chandar gladly obliges his daughter, even though she’s moved on from nursery rhymes. Now Chu Chu is into Barbie videos and cakes thanks to one of YouTube’s highest-paid personalities, Rosanna Pansino, a 32-year-old celebrity chef who teaches kids how to bake.

 

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