Meet Nisha Madhulika. A Hindi-speaking homemaker, the 54-year-old lives in Noida. And runs a cookery channel on YouTube.
Madhulika knows only Indian cooking and uploads videos on home-made food, popular snacks and sweets. In a year-and-a-half, she has 15,000 steady, loyal subscribers. Her videos get close to 50,000 views a day and that translates into an income of Rs 15 lakh a year.
?After my children grew up, I was left with a lot of free time. I started writing a blog in 2008 on Indian recipes. It soon became extremely popular. It was the readers who pushed me to get into videos,? the mother of two said.
Arranging equipment and learning how to make videos didn?t take much time because her husband and elder son run a computer software business and were, therefore, clued in. Today, she has more than 600 videos to her credit. ?I get close to 50,000 views a day. The appreciation of my viewers is what I cherish the most. My videos have given me an identity.?
Chennai-based Jayalakshmi Sachidanandam was a freelance make-up artist before she began making videos on make-up and beauty tips. Today, she monetizes her videos through Google Adwords. The videos have also helped boost a freelance business, including a bridal make-up assignment bagged from Singapore last year.
In Hyderabad, Veena Nair took to making videos after she had to quit a high-profile IT job for ?family reasons?. A foodie herself, food videos were her first choice. She became the global winner of YouTube Next Chef, a cookery video contest organised by the website in November 2012.
Singer and lyricist Sona Mohapatra from Orissa was the first Indian artiste to licence a YouTube channel in her name in 2007. A popular singer, she now performs on international platforms, courtesy the reach and popularity of her videos.
One of the youngest ?videopreneurs? ? that?s what people making a living from videos on platforms such as YouTube are called ? is Sonal Sagaraya of Mumbai.
?I was in Class XII when I discovered the joy of watching videos online. It didn?t take me long to launch my own channel. A year and half ago, with the help of a friend, I bought some equipment and we started making videos on make-up and beauty tips,? the 22-year-old said.
Today, she and her partner have a beauty and tech channel licensed in their names and she gets close to 7,000 views a day on the back of 1,367 subscribers. ?This is now a full-time vocation. We are working on making our content better, distinct, exclusive so that we can monetize it better.?
While most of these women took to making videos as a means of self-expression, money followed. According to estimates, reasonably successful women videopreneurs are earning anywhere from Rs 1,000 to Rs 5,000 a day, depending on the pull of their content.
Being the most popular video-sharing platform, YouTube has emerged as a major destination for such initiatives. In 2007, the YouTube Video Partner programme was launched in the US. According to a spokesperson, it opened in a big way for individual content creators in India around a year and half ago.
The programme offered individuals to upload their content and the opportunity to monetize it through advertising. While YouTube keeps a certain share of the advertisement revenue generated, the rest is passed on to the content creators. The platform is extremely popular among women. ?We have seen women creators from teenagers to homemakers in the age group of 50-55 come on board,? a YouTube spokesperson said.
According to the spokesperson, most videos created by women are on beauty, cooking, health, fitness, fashion, relationship advice, dance, music, children ? and they mostly attract women audiences. And women being an attractive target group for advertisers, the country?s top 50 advertisers are using the platform to reach out to them, the spokesperson said.