‘ChuChu TV’ plans to tie up with a big media house

It’s real fun when there’s ChuChu TV at home

Ask any parent of a toddler and they will surely know about ChuChu TV, a Youtube channel in the pre-school education space. Launched in 2013, it is the fourth largest Youtube channel in India, having reached 10 million viewers in its 4th year with just 154 videos.

In a chat with our correspondent, Larry Bradley, Vinoth Chandar, co-founder & CEO of ChuChu TV, talks about how great story telling and music, embedded with a positive message have worked for them as it keeps engaging kids all around the world in a way that they keep coming back.

Entrepreneurship begins at home: I had created a video for my daughter Harshitha whom we also lovingly call ChuChu at home. It was her favourite ‘Chubby Cheeks’ nursery rhyme. I uploaded it to YouTube  under the name ChuChu TV just to get some feedback and was astonished to see the video had become popular instantly with 3,00,000 views within a couple of weeks. We created a second video ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ and that got even more popular. Within weeks we had 5,000 subscribers. That’s when we realized that we were onto something massive and decided to start thinking seriously about creating dedicated content for the preschool and toddler space. Today we are a fully equipped in-house animation/media studio with around 200 employees in Chennai, but it all started with the core team of childhood friends- me, Krishnan, Ajith Togo, Suresh Bhoopathy and Subbiramanian. Krishnan and I head the creative side of the company while the other three have taken up other important roles.

Filling a gap: After my Bachelors degree in Computer Applications from Madras University, I started out with working in tech and eventually we entered the content space by doing projects in games, ringtones and developing content software. On starting ChuChu TV, our research showed that there were a lot of channels offering pre-school content, but they were using the same premise of nursery rhymes and recycling the same content set to the same tunes. We decided we wanted to add meaning, relevance and positive messaging. We earn through advertisements on YouTube. It is someway linked to the views but it is mainly dependent on how much the CPMs( Cost Per Thousand) are.

Investment & Revenue Model of ChuChu TV: Initial investment after the second video was a few lakh from personal funds of the founders, mostly spent on software and artists. We earn mainly through advertisements on YouTube. While it is someway linked to the views, it is mainly dependent on how much the CPMs (cost per thousand) are. This differs from country to country.

We have been in talks with investors but we will go ahead with the fundraising process only when we find a strategic partner who understand our business and share our goals and vision. We would ideally like to partner with a larger media company as our strategic partner.

Growth & Expectations on ChuChu TV: In the first couple of years the growth was 100 per cent. Post that, we have made more investments and last year, the growth was around 50 per cent. Since we have not raised any fund, all the investments have been from personal funds and revenues got invested back into the business. Next year, we expect the growth to be higher. Being a content business, all our investments go into creation of content.

Smart marketing for ChuChu TV: From day one we have been doing high quality content which has helped us to become a brand in the pre-school space. Our cute little fans and their parents around the world are our main marketing team. Young parents love us a lot because their kids love us and in turn they recommend us to their relatives and friends. So it has been mostly word of mouth. We have always had a good social presence but for the past one year we have started to concentrate a lot on social media because it’s where the parents are and we want to be there to engage them with our brand.

Our key to success is offering a well rounded product that addresses a potential need and to keep getting better at it what we do.

Would you be interested in investing into a YouTube channel for children? Do share your views.