India's creator economy is experiencing significant growth, with the lines blurring between who a creator and a viewer is, said Ishan John Chatterjee, YouTube's director for India. As of December 2022, it has over 7,000 YouTube channels with over one million subscribers. This figure reflects a remarkable 50 percent increase compared to the previous year. Furthermore, the country boasts a substantial number of over 75,000 channels with audiences exceeding 100,000 subscribers.

"The total number of hours of content uploaded to YouTube by Indian channels grew 40 percent YoY from June this year over the previous period," Chatterjee said.

Speaking exclusively to CNBC-TV18 on the sidelines of the YouTube in India FanFest, Chatterjee added that a recent study YouTube did with Oxford Economics also showed that YouTube's creative ecosystem contributed over Rs 16,000 crore to India's GDP and supported the equivalent of 7.5 lakh full-time jobs.

And this is where YouTube's bet for the Indian market lies – to be a platform for the creator economy and attract them to the platform through a range of monetisation options.

"Our goal has always been to be the best long-term platform for our Creators by making it easy for creators to create new content. The second thing we want to do is make it easy for creators to make money on the platform by giving them a wide range of monetisation options so that they can build sustainable businesses and convert their passions into full-time professions," he added.

"But one thing that is different now than it was a few years ago is that the nature of video consumption has become completely participative. Earlier on, you would have had people or fans of creators engage with likes, comments, or subscriptions. But now we're seeing fans really jump in. They're creating fandoms, they define subcultures, react with their photos and videos. And that's really driving a lot of growth into new genres as well," Chatterjee said.

While content creation in India started to grow in the mid-2000s, YouTube says the real explosion happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

To aid this growth, YouTube also recently announced a range of artificial intelligence-based tools aimed at content creation on its platform. "The AI-related tools that we announced last week at Made on YouTube will do a couple of things for our creators. First, we think it will unlock new forms of creative expression, remove friction from the creation process, and help our creators connect with more viewers," he added.

These tools include Dream Screen, where creators can create an AI-generated image or video as a background to a YouTube Shorts video by typing in an idea into a prompt.

This, Chatterjee says, is currently being tested with a small group of creators and is likely to be rolled out widely next year. It also launched YouTube Create, an editing app for mobile-first creators, currently in beta form on Android, available for free, and expected to be rolled out widely next year.

(Edited by : Anand Singha)