BENGALURU: Regional content is turning out to be king for YouTube India. The video platform claims the growth of regional viewership has tripled over the past two years, helping to make content creation in languages ranging from Haryanvi to Tamil and Telugu a profitable business."Apart from Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam are seeing massive growth in watch time, with other languages including Haryanvi, Marathi, Bengali and others following closely behind,“ Satya Raghavan, head of entertainment at YouTube India, told ET.The top 10 regional YouTube channels in India have subscriber bases ranging from 3,00,000 to over 8,00,000. Haryanvi comedy channel Nazar Battu Productions has a following of over 6,00,000 and earns $3,000-4,000 a month from sponsors and advertisers. "We started in December 2015 and our first video went completely viral reaching 2.5million views," Ameen Khan, cofounder of Nazar Battu Productions, told ET. "We then started making videos on trending issues ranging from the odd-even policy in Delhi to Salman Khan's verdict and within nine months, we had 1 lakh subscribers. This was a huge growth."According to YouTube, the target viewership that consumes content from Nazar Battu Productions is individuals aged 18 to 28, with 70% of them being male. Nazar Battu Productions creates about four videos a month and earns revenue through branded content, advertising and sponsorships. "Farhan Akhtar's movie Lucknow Central is one of the sponsors. This is one of the easiest ways for them to promote a film since our channel has a targeted viewership," said Khan.According to Raghavan, YouTube shares a majority of the revenue generated with the content creators."Brands now realise they can reach consumers in different pockets of India by partnering with these content creators. For instance, Hindustan Unilever would show only Hindi ads and now they have the opportunity to make advertisements in diverse Indian languages," he said.Since 2011, YouTube has worked with regional studios to help them get a wider distribution. In 2014, content creators from Mumbai including TVF and AIB were making waves on YouTube and gaining traction. A large portion of this content was a mix of Hindi and English, which proved to be popular in the metropolitan cities including Mumbai, New Delhi and Bengaluru."By the end of 2014 and early 2015, we saw these metro content creators had inspired content creators in South India and many of them were creating content in Malayalam, Telugu, Tamil, and so on," said Raghavan. "In 2016, it started to spill over into other languages like Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Haryanvi and now in 2017, it is seeing a major growth for these regional languages and even Hindi is being represented by content creators in different dialects."YouTube India said Indian language partner content viewership is doubling annually and it also has a global audience, with 40% of the subscribers outside India. Punjabi content is a hit among the Indian diaspora in the US, the UK and Canada, while south Indian language content is popular in the Middle East.YouTube India has close to 100 web series that are live, with south India alone contributing 40% of them, and about two dozen more in the works. While comedy creators were the first to taste success in India, other genres in categories such as music, technology and food started making a mark last year."In 2016, we saw over 500 creators across India get over 1,00,000 subscribers - that is at least one channel crossing this threshold every day," Raghavan said.YouTube India is also studying what kind of content works in various languages. A lot of popular Marathi content is in the form of web series, whereas in Punjabi, the preference is music and for Bengali and Malayalee audiences, it is movies. The other areas include fashion, wellness, nutrition, education, gaming, do-it-yourself and children's content.