`"YouTube India is bigger than MTV India this year in terms of revenues," Google India Managing Director Rajan Anandan claimed at the India Digital Summit in Delhi today. "If you want to engage with urban youth between 14 and 30, there is no bigger platform. We get 5 million uniques a day on YouTube India," he added. Anandan was responding to a question on performance versus brand advertising. YouTube has made a fairly big push over the last couple of years, beginning with a tie-up with the Indian Premier League, which continued the next year with a tie-up with Indiatimes*, for live streaming. They've also made a push towards trying to bring more content providers on board. In addition, they launched YouTube Box Office, streaming advertising supported films online, as well as a deal with IPRS for the monetization of music on YouTube. Anandan didn't talk about how much exactly YouTube is making, or how much MTV India is making, but this is a claim that is, like most of his claims (about 100+ Internet users in India, if you remember the animated proclamations at Ad:Tech last year) and predictions (300 million Internet users in 2014) that are targeted at getting advertisers interested in YouTube. And it appears to have exactly that. A media planner I ran into after the session told me that he'll share this information with this team for a large FMCG brand that is putting money into MTV, to look more aggressively at YouTube.
