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In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18, Ajay Vidyasagar, MD, YouTube, Southeast Asia and Emerging Markets, highlighted how India is not only keeping pace with global trends but in many ways setting them.
According to Vidyasagar, India continues to play a crucial role in shaping how storytelling, technology, and commerce converge on YouTube.
Ajay Vidyasagar, MD, YouTube, Southeast Asia and Emerging Markets, believes India is playing a pivotal role in the global evolution of storytelling, thanks to its deep engagement with artificial intelligence (AI), VFX, and multi-format content creation. In an exclusive conversation with Storyboard18 at the sidelines of WAVES 2025, he highlighted YouTube’s strong foothold in India’s advertising landscape and its evolving role in the broader content ecosystem.
“YouTube is one of the core parts of the advertising solution rubric (in India). And we feel that the journey of helping our advertisers understand, try, scale, and succeed is a beautiful circle that we have seen in our 16 years of existence,” Vidyasagar said, reflecting on the platform’s longstanding relationship with Indian advertisers.
Expressing appreciation for the market, he added, “We are very grateful to India's brands and advertisers for how leaned in they are, and how much trust they have with us.”
He noted that YouTube’s success lies in its comprehensive offering.
“We come in with a very solution-oriented approach. We help products and services succeed in generating their sale or generating their trials, and YouTube has a full funnel solution for that.” He emphasised that the combination of YouTube’s content diversity and Google’s strength in ad measurement creates a powerful value proposition.
“On one hand, it is the richness of our content diversity and format diversity. On the other hand, it's the advertising measurement richness that Google is a world leader in. And when those two fuse—that's the reason why it works.”
Turning to India’s growing influence in content and technology, Vidyasagar discussed the role of AI and VFX in storytelling. “AI is a very material sort of movement in the content industry. But if you think about a lot of the research from users that you are seeing in this country, 72% of Indians recognise that AI is very important to enhance productivity. While that's a very significant number, and India is actually one of the most committed and enrolled sets of users in AI.”
He noted, however, that AI’s impact has limits— especially in storytelling.
“India also has a lot of desk research that is telling us that one of the few industries where AI may not be able to really shape the core work is storytelling. Storytelling is about human connections, human emotions, and human stories. And so I find this topic very fascinating because on one hand, AI is about productivity. On the other hand, AI is not so much about core storytelling. So it is about human experiences.”
Comparing India’s storytelling style to the West, he said, “If you take Hollywood in the film industry, which is fundamentally the content industry, you would have clear explanation in the story that Iron Man had plutonium, or Spider Man had a particular spider bite, and he became Spider-Man. But if you take Indian cinema, you will see that Baahubali Katappa is larger than life, and there is no explanation why he's like that.
Indians live a hard life. 95% of India live a very hard life. They come to consume content, to experience something that is a different world.
"In India, larger than life is organic. I would say in the Western world, there is some context given to something that happened that led to that change happening.”
Vidyasagar also spoke about India’s booming creator economy.
“India is one of the largest creator economies in the world. YouTube's largest market in the world is India. And what we are seeing in India is that Indian creators are extraordinarily rich storytellers.”
He pointed out that Indian creators excel in making the most of YouTube’s format diversity.
“They use storytelling in its truest sense, and they also are able to leverage YouTube's multiple formats, including long form, mid form, short form, and live podcast. And I would say India is one of the markets where the multi-format richness of YouTube is leveraged in its best way in the world.”
It is to be noted that in just the last three years, YouTube has paid over Rs 21,000 crore to creators, artists, and media companies across India. On May 1, day one of the Summit, Neal Mohan, YouTube, CEO shared that in the next two years, YouTube will invest over Rs 850 crore to accelerate the growth of Indian creators, artists, and media companies.
Further into the conversation, Vidyasagar also pointed out the beauty of YouTube is that it allows users the experience in a multi-format manner, and the ability to be very dexterous in how one can choose.
According to Vidyasagar, India continues to play a crucial role in shaping how storytelling, technology, and commerce converge on YouTube.
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