WhatsApp jokes, the essential fodder of every Mumbaikar with a mobile, don’t materialise out of thin air; there’s an entire industry of writers toiling away at concocting your daily dose of haha hehe.Sixteen years ago, JD Ghai decided to register the brand and website santabanta.com. The management graduate son of a Ludhiana business family was 31 at the time. Humour, for him, was both a hobby and family proclivity. His grandmother was called Banto, and her sister had been fittingly named Santo. “There were already Santo-Banto jokes that my nanaji was telling us all the time. That stuck in my mind forever,” said the jovial and now middle-aged Ghai, sitting in his plush Chandigarh office.In 1999, when Ghai’s website began publishing Santa-Banta jokes, the comical twosome who had ruled the north Indian joke circuit generation for decades weren’t quite internet-ready yet. But the smartphone proved to be the missing trigger.It doesn't take much effort to forward a joke you find on WhatsApp or the internet, but a whole host of writers, bloggers, entrepreneurs and marketing managers are toiling hard to ensure that you keep giggling and sharing.With its arrival, santabanta. com rediscovered humour and its profitability. The website introduced multiple categories of humour that it keeps adding across a range of media – Hindi, Hinglish, Marriage, Love, Bar, Blonde, Pappu, News and Politics.The website has, on an average, six lakh visitors every day; and maintaining those numbers is hard work for those employed by the company that is worth over Rs 100 crore. “There is something for everyone. For feature phones, we have SMS jokes, of less than 140 characters. We also have restricted content like non-veg jokes. They are very popular on WhatsApp and in real life situations too. Every time people get together for a wedding or a birthday party, they want to share non-veg jokes.Earlier only men did that, now even ladies are doing it in their kitty parties,” said Ghai, extending a jar of biscuits across the table. “Sharing is very important. It makes people happy.”On July 18, Harchitvan Singh, the 25-year-old manager of digital marketing at Santabanta.com, woke up wondering: wouldn’t it be nice to not have to work on the weekend? In an office meeting later that day, Singh shared the thought with his colleagues, and they decided it was a feeling so universal that Santa should share it with the world. The next day, lakhs of followers giggled at the openly joyful expression on the face of Santa: as the portly Sikh tucked himself in for the night, the caption read, “That awesome moment you go to sleep and you don’t have to set up the alarm clock”. The humour in the cartoon is, at best, elusive – unusual, perhaps, for the broad Santa-Banta tradition, but quite common for Santabanta.com’s spin on that tradition, given the pressure they feel to feed the now hungry internet.The “picture SMS” was one of the three posts the Santabanta team uploaded on its Facebook page that day. They’d also refresh their pages on Twitter and Pinterest with jokes packaged according to the nature of the respective platform. And before their work day ended, they’d add new content to the vast database of jokes, memes and videos whose circulation keeps the company on top of the humour-for-share business – one that’s exploded since the arrival of mobile internet.The Santabanta team comprises a total of eight employees who divide themselves between writing content, packaging it with audio-visual accoutrements – images, videos, animation, voiceovers – and pushing it on social media and messaging apps for smartphones. On the afternoon of July 20, the team was huddled inside a room in the company headquarters, vast and personalised in the style of family businesses, in a commercial complex in Chandigarh to discuss a grave matter: their social media reach and ways to expand it.“A few weeks back we took the decision to add the face of Santa to all our jokes on Facebook and to limit the text to two or three lines because a reader then takes less time to click like. By doing so, we have increased the average engagement for each post from 10,000 to 60,000,” said Singh, a cheerful Sikh man who also does the voiceovers for humorous videos produced by the team, whether it’s Santa, his naïve comic foil Banta, or any of the ever-growing cast of characters in the world of santabanta.com.Days at the santabanta.com office begin with a meeting where the team discusses the trending topics of the day and their potential for jokes. “And we keep bouncing off ideas the whole day. Every time someone comes up with a joke, they will send it to the company’s internal WhatsApp group, and if everyone gives it a thumbs up, it gets added to our database,” says Manjeet Singh, the young man in charge of content. The topic chosen in the meeting on the morning of July 20 was “monsoon” since it had been raining in Chandigarh. By 5 pm, the team posted a cartoon on social media that was inspired by the possible washout of Parliament’s monsoon session – a beleaguered Narendra Modi hiding in a wet straw basket as the opposition leaders closed in on him.Manjeet Singh pointed out to me that not every day is as light as this one. “We had a really busy time with Maggi controversy and the Vyapam scam recently. For three weeks, we were working on jokes around Maggi itself, but we were able to create a huge hype. Most of the jokes shared on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp came from our website,” he said with clear pride. One such offering on the website read, “Agar 'Maggi' band ho gayi toh sabsey jyada pareshaani un ladkiyon ko hogi jo apne 'biodata' mei likhti hain (If Maggi were to be banned, those most inconvenienced by it would be the girls who write on their matrimonial profiles) … I Like Cooking.”Their job on any given day is to think of jokes around the topic that has the highest potential for going ‘viral’. “Sir, it’s not wise for you to go out today,” an astrologer cautions Modi as he sets out to wish “Eid Mubarak” to the public in a recent cartoon in the ‘news and politics’ section of santabanta. com, “what if the people demand ‘achhe din’ as Eidi?”In the early 2000s, santabanta. com was known not for its humour, but for its ‘Bollywood news and imagery’. “Around 2005, the website began to make profits and it became and continues to be the number one destination for Bollywood wallpapers,” boasted JD Ghai. Over the next few minutes, Ghai searched the wallpapers of one Bollywood actress after another — Aishwarya Rai, Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor — on Google, with the performative flourish of a magician, to show me how the first result the web threw up was santabanta. com.“Every few years, you have to think about the tastes of a 16 or 18 year old. What they like to share might not be the same as what they like. You have to be very fast in catching up with trends, in innovating. My son, who's now 21 and about to join the company, advises me on new strategies, like more focus on shorter jokes, more SMS jokes, jokes designed as Facebook covers. We also have a YouTube channel for funny videos, where fans can subscribe for free, and the more they share the content around, the more a buzz builds around the brand, the more visitors we get on our website,” Ghai said.Most of the company’s revenue comes from advertisements on the website. “The average rate is 60-70 rupees for every 1000 impressions on an ad. Each visit to the website counts as an impression,” Rajeev Sharma, the man in charge of advertising at santabanta.com, explained.Santabanta.com also makes profit from selling its content to other media platforms. “We have tie-ups with many media outlets – the Times of India, News Hunt, NDTV, etc.,” said JD Ghai. “We provide videos to these outlets for a fixed price for a bouquet of content. It could be 60,000 or 1,00,000 rupees per month for videos, and they make it available to subscribers of mobile phone companies, Airtel or Vodafone, as value added services. The mobile service operators make money off the download of each 50 paisa or 1 rupee video, and a part of the total amount off the download is shared with the intermediary.”However laughable the idea might have seemed in a pre-WhatsApp era, there’s now money in making pre-packaged humour available to those twitching to share it, and Santabanta.com isn’t the only player in the business.There isn’t a single shade of humour or twinge of emotion that you might want to share with your social network and can’t find with a click of your mouse, from love messages to Lohri greetings. Sprouting like weed all over the Indian section of the internet are websites that have essentially replaced the little booklets featuring jokes, shayari, quotes, festival greetings and puzzles produced by small publishers in Delhi’s Daryaganj and sold at railway platforms across the country.Other than things to share, what they offer their visitors is help with building their identities on virtual platforms. Visitors can choose between display pictures (babies, flowers, cartoons, film stars) or status updates (sad, cool, motivational, flirtatious); they can pick content fitting peculiar needs, such as proposing to someone on WhatsApp or breaking up with a Facebook friend.Updating this content on a daily basis takes work and passion if you believe the story of people who run these websites, often single-handedly. Ragin Patel, 31-yearold system analyst based in Ohio, started whatsapptext.com as a blog in 2013, prompted by the sheer number of jokes he received over the messaging app every day. It was tragic, he thought, that they were lost to posterity.“Within a few months,” Patel told me over email, “the traffic started increasing, which gave us the required confidence and encouragement to grow the site and its content.” Every newsworthy event leads to hundreds of jokes and memes around it – an unfortunate comment by a politician, the release of a big Bollywood film, and of course anything and everything to do with Modi.A computer engineer from Gujarat, Patel takes considerable pride in the fact that one of the joke series that recently ‘trended’ on WhatsApp had originated in his home state. The ‘Jo Baka’ jokes and memes featured the sad face emoji dispensing life advice (“masalo khava thi cancer thay” or “eating spicy food causes cancer”) in the manner of a concerned grandfather. “We converted those memes to Hindi and started ‘Dekh Bhai’. This really helped us connect with the users.”Like most websites in the business, whatsapptext.com targets two categories of audiences. “Those below 25 years – they like Bollywood jokes or boys vs. girls jokes, and general knowledge messages. Second, the 25-35 age group. They are more interested in political jokes or husband-wife jokes,” Ragin explained.For Arsh Kapoor, a 24-year-old professional blogger from Delhi, running whatsappmessages.net is a full-time job. “I currently have a dedicated team of four – two content writers, one social media promoter and myself – that helps me generate stuff for my website on a regular basis. Sometimes the idea comes from other websites or resources, and sometimes we have our own ideas.” The content under the ‘trending’ section on whatsappmessages. net includes WhatsApp display pictures for Eid and a multimedia article outraging over the alleged discovery that some rice in ration shops contained plastic. Most of the 10,000 daily visitors to his website go there for “Whatsapp DP, Whatsapp Status, entertainment … cricket when we have an Indian series and politics goes viral during elections.”Sadhan Samanta, 36-year-old Delhi-based consultant for a medical transcription company, also started Whatsappshares.com as a blog. “The website came into existence in September 2014,” Samanta told me over email. Currently he’s the only one putting in the labour. He aggregates the content from a mix of the jokes he receives over WhatsApp and those submitted to him online. However, he “plans to develop content once the website starts generating its own funds.” From the way he explained the progress of the project (“as per Google analytics, in the last 30 days, page views are approximately 150,000”), he might not have to wait long.The common ways through which these websites make – or envision making – profits is by using Google AdSense, which allows approved companies to post automatic text, image or video advertisements on the websites signed up with the search engine. “Ad Revenue is a function of multiple factors, including (but not limited to) the amount of kind of content, type, size, design and placement of ads, ad-pricing auction dynamics, advertiser budgets, site popularity (both among users and advertisers), and visitor traffic. Majority share of the ad revenues goes to the publishers and we retain part of it,” said Gaurav Bhaskar, a spokesperson for Google’s India operation.Ragin Patel of whatsapptext.com said his website makes between 300 and 350 dollars a month from subscribing to AdSense. Arsh Kapoor of whatsappmesaages.net told me he gets paid three or four American dollars by Google for every 500 views on an advertisement, the daily revenue adding up to 15 dollars a day. The rest of it comes from sponsored content on the website. One currently running on whatsappmessages. net extols the potential of an iPhone app which lets a user put together creative display pictures for WhatsApp.And there are those whose interest in the business of WhatsApp-based content has nothing to do with money, and yet most of these projects wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without their enthusiasm. For Ankit Patel Ghanshyam Bhai, a 26-year- old engineering teacher in Nanded, submitting WhatsApp jokes to various websites is his way to remain connected with current affairs. “I am obsessed with it. Any day that I don’t read the newspaper in the morning is a waste,” Patel told me over the phone. From the way his voice sounded — hesitant and halting — I imagined he was someone who would rather express himself over a WhatsApp chat than a phone conversation. An active user of WhatsApp for over a year now, Patel’s the administrator of four groups on it — “One of them called Patel group, it’s for family; second is for cousin brothers; third is called a-la-ooooooo, the expression in Gujarati when you get surprised; and the fourth la-oooo, also an expression for surprise.”Patel ensures that his groups remain among the top sources of humorous content on websites that then channel it back to WhatsApp. He does it mainly by choosing “involved members.” Most of the content circulating on his WhatsApp network deals with current affairs, naturally: “Right now, for example, since Modi is on many foreign tours, there are jokes around that.”Today, when Patel compares the quality of his life before and after signing up on WhatsApp, he sees no reason to retreat: “Earlier, when I was not on WhatsApp, my friend used to say, ‘Get on WhatsApp, there are so many things you will learn – current affairs, veg jokes, non-veg jokes. Things you won’t even get from watching TV because of news channels’ conspiracies.’ After joining it, I realised he was right. WhatsApp is really great.”