India is YouTube’s fastest growing market, says Pichai

san francisco — India offers great potential for Google-owned YouTube’s growth and the latest in the journey is YouTube Music that has been downloaded more than 15 million times in the country, CEO Sundar Pichai has said.

Admitting that recent ad product changes in YouTube and Search are hurting its top-line growth, the company sounded bullish on YouTube during its first quarter results on Monday.

“YouTube Music and YouTube Premium are now available in 43 countries up from five markets at the start of 2018. In mid-March, we launched YouTube Music in India, one of YouTube’s fastest growing markets.

“Since launch, the YouTube Music app has been downloaded more than 15 million times in the country,” Pichai told analysts during the company’s earnings call.

YouTube’s ad business, for both brand and direct response campaigns, continues to grow and support our creators, he said..

Pichai said he is focused towards sanitising the content on YouTube. “Maybe I will start with the YouTube comments. I talked about in the area of content responsibility, we are definitely focused on making sure we are constantly improving how we are handling both in terms of reducing the content and shouldn’t be there on the platform.

“More importantly, making sure when we recommend content that we are recommending high-quality content as well as reducing harmful content or low-quality content being recommended,” he emphasised.