Monday Musing: YouTube’s India Boom
By Dr Samar Verma*
YouTube Is Not Zomato: Why Platform Rules Matter?
YouTube is not Zomato. It is not Swiggy. But it is a platform: a private, algorithmically mediated marketplace that coordinates millions of users, creators, advertisers, and intermediaries. And in labour-surplus economies, platforms can be both ladders and traps- expanding opportunity while also intensifying precarity if rules, enforcement, and bargaining power do not keep pace.
India’s YouTube Impact Report for 2024 (released with Oxford Economics analysis) is a strong empirical anchor for this debate. It documents scale: the YouTube “creative ecosystem” is estimated to have contributed over ₹16,000 crore to India’s GDP in 2024 and supported more than 9.3 lakh full-time equivalent jobs. It also reports ₹850 crore of investment directly into India’s creator ecosystem in 2024.
These numbers matter. But they do not settle the question that should matter even more: are these good jobs, and are the conditions under which value is created consistent with what the International Labour Organization calls “decent work”- fair income, security, social protection, voice, and equal opportunity?
The challenge is to hold two truths at once. First, platforms like YouTube can democratise voice, enable micro-entrepreneurship, and lower entry barriers in ways that traditional labour markets often fail to do. Second, their business model can also reproduce (and sometimes amplify) the asymmetries of modern capitalism: concentrated market power, opaque governance, risk shifted onto individuals, and a constant push toward monetisation that can distort incentives, especially for youth.
This is not an argument for glorifying or condemning YouTube – a major economic actor whose incentives are not automatically aligned with society’s goals- unless rules, institutions, and enforcement make them so.
The Creator Economy Is Real, and It Is Growing Fast
Across YouTube’s India “impact” series over the last several years, a consistent pattern appears: rising estimated GDP contribution and employment supported, a widening base of creators attempting to monetise, and a growing reliance on the platform as a learning and livelihood infrastructure.
We can observe the trend in headline estimates (all based on Oxford Economics’ framework of direct, indirect, induced, and catalytic impacts). For 2020, a widely reported estimate was that ₹6,800 crore contributed to GDP and 6.84 lakh full-time equivalent jobs were supported. For 2021, reported estimates rose to over ₹10,000 crore and 7.5 lakh jobs. By 2024, the estimate is over ₹16,000 crore and 9.3 lakh jobs.
The 2024 report’s micro-level signals are equally telling. It notes that in 2023, more than 65,000 channels earned over ₹1,00,000, and that among creators who earn money from YouTube, 63% say income from the platform is their primary revenue source.
That is a livelihood statement- not a hobby statement. The report also provides sectoral “use” indicators that illuminate why YouTube has become woven into the economy’s social fabric. Ninety-seven per cent of teachers surveyed who use YouTube believe it helps provide “engaging learning experiences.” Seventy per cent of SMBs surveyed say YouTube is “essential” to their business growth, and 92% of music companies surveyed say YouTube is essential to their business.
From an economist’s lens, these signals are consistent with the platform functioning as a multi-sided market that reduces search and distribution costs. YouTube helps match niche supply (content) with fragmented demand (viewers), creates a long tail of micro-earnings, and provides infrastructure- hosting, discovery, monetisation rails- that individuals and small firms could not build alone.
But this is only half the story.
Beyond the Creator Economy Hype
Platforms create value not only by enabling exchange, but by governing it. Governance here is not public law; it is platform policy, algorithmic ranking, monetisation rules, and enforcement mechanisms- often opaque to those whose livelihoods depend on them.
This is where the Cyberhub analogy deepens – A few days ago, at a very happening, hip hop business sparkle, Cyberhub, in the Millennium City in Gurgaon, they raised the parking fee to a flat rate of Rs 200! Until recently, one could drop off passengers, and if you leave within 15 minutes, you pay no parking. Until recently, the parking was Rs 60 for the first 2 hours, and escalating for every hour; not anymore, as one now has to compulsorily shell out Rs 400 to enter and leave, without even parking!
This is the business model which does not need reform; it needs reconstruction- destroy and create anew. Ask the parking attendants if their wages or benefits increased with this exorbitant rise in revenues for the owners, and the response is anyone’s guess. Lesser staff (since now none were required to ‘man’ the automated machines), more work, and the same wages, even though, as a visitor, vehicle owners pay Rs 200 every time they enter the parking lot, even just to drop guests, and not to park.
This is a market-determined pricing mechanism at its best! So what is wrong? Aren’t people still queuing up to enter the Cyberhub? One might ask. But the Cyberhub episode is not really about parking. It is about how modern capitalism increasingly prices access rather than value, and how efficiency gains often accrue to owners while work becomes thinner, more surveilled, and less secure.
The same logic- automate, centralise, monetise attention, and externalise risk- underpins much of the platform economy, from food delivery to online video.
The parking system at the Cyber Hub is “efficient” and “market-priced.” The queues prove demand. Yet the visitor’s experience feels extractive, and the attendant’s work conditions can remain unchanged despite higher revenues. That is not a failure of markets in the abstract; it is a feature of markets with unequal bargaining power and rules set by owners.
Ha-Joon Chang has long argued- provocatively but importantly- that “free markets” are not naturally occurring states of nature; they are constructed through rules and institutions. What we call “market outcomes” are often outcomes of market design and power. Dani Rodrik, similarly, has emphasised that markets require “non-market institutions” to be created, sustained, and made legitimate- meaning the real question is not “state versus market,” but which institutional arrangements shape market outcomes, and for whom.
YouTube Is a Platform Economy—Not a Dream Factory
Apply that lens to YouTube. The platform’s basic model monetises attention. Revenue is maximised when time-on-platform, repeat engagement, and advertiser-friendly inventory rise. Creators, therefore, face powerful incentives: upload frequency, topic selection, thumbnail design, emotional hooks, trend-chasing, and content that fits algorithmic distribution patterns. Many creators succeed ethically and creatively within these constraints. Yet the constraints remain, and they matter for youth.
The 2024 report notes that 55% of creators started their channel in the last five years.
This is a youth-heavy phenomenon by definition. For a 19-year-old or 22-year-old, YouTube can look like a meritocracy: “If I work hard and understand the algorithm, I can rise.” Sometimes that is true. But the labour economics of such markets also produce a predictable outcome: a winner-takes-most distribution where many people supply labour (content) while a smaller share captures outsized earnings.
This is not unique to India or YouTube. It is a structural property of superstar markets, where technology enables a few producers to serve vast audiences, and where attention behaves like a scarce resource that concentrates. The result is often income volatility, uneven bargaining power, and a shadow workforce of freelancers, editors, thumbnail designers, assistants, and gig-like workers who are paid informally without stable protections.
The YouTube report itself acknowledges the ecosystem includes not only creators but an array of supporting roles, including editors and other collaborators.
That is precisely why the “jobs supported” metric should not be read as synonymous with “good jobs created.” Supported employment can include precarious work, low pay, and informal arrangements unless institutions intervene.
India’s Creator Boom: Opportunity Without Guarantees
For India’s youth, the upside is tangible. YouTube lowers barriers to entry. It allows skill signalling without formal gatekeepers. It enables learning at scale, including vernacular knowledge that traditional institutions often ignore. The report’s survey-based findings on teachers and learning underscore that YouTube has become a de facto supplementary education layer.
But youth also face new vulnerabilities, three of which deserve particular attention.
First is time as an economic resource. Attention is not merely psychological; it is economic. When millions of young people spend hours in an attention market, the opportunity cost is not only leisure- it can be displacement of study, sleep, physical activity, and offline social capital. The global evidence base increasingly treats problematic social media use as a public health concern. For example, WHO/Europe reporting on adolescent behaviour finds that problematic social media use is non-trivial and rising in several contexts, with implications for well-being. The U.S. Surgeon General has also warned that social media can pose risks to youth mental health, urging stronger safeguards. India does not need to import another country’s moral panic, but it should not ignore the underlying behavioural economics: platforms are optimised to keep users engaged.
Second is the shifting locus of aspiration. When a platform becomes a visible route to upward mobility, it can reshape what young people perceive as “work.” Some of this is beneficial: entrepreneurship becomes thinkable. Some is less so: a large pool of aspirants supplies unpaid or underpaid labour for long periods, hoping to “break out.” That resembles contest-based labour markets, where many invest heavily with low probability of success- an arrangement that can be rational individually but inefficient and inequitable socially.
Third is governance externalities: misinformation, polarisation, and harmful content pathways. No major platform is immune. The question is whether governance systems are transparent, consistent, and accountable enough to manage risks at scale. Here, international experience is instructive. The European Union’s Digital Services Act (DSA), for example, imposes obligations on very large online platforms around systemic risk assessment, mitigation, transparency of recommender systems, and independent auditing. The DSA is not perfect, and it is still early in implementation- but it reflects a policy direction: treating platforms as infrastructure with public-interest obligations, not merely as private products.
India’s discourse can benefit from observing such models- not as templates to copy, but as evidence that sophisticated regulation is possible without strangling innovation.
The Creator Economy’s Hidden Labour Question
The most important conceptual bridge between YouTube and food delivery platforms is not the app interface- it is the broader shift toward fragmented, platform-mediated work where individuals shoulder risk and volatility.
India has, very recently, enacted four labour codes intended to consolidate and modernise labour regulation, including the Code on Wages (2019) and three codes passed in 2020: Industrial Relations, Social Security, and Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions. In public debate, the key question has been implementation sequencing, rules, and how protections translate from statute to lived reality- particularly for informal and platform workers.
“Future-ready work” is not only about job creation but about the quality, dignity, and protections attached to work, especially as platforms diffuse into more sectors.
This is precisely where YouTube and creator work enter the frame. A large part of the creator economy sits in a grey zone: neither traditional employment nor pure entrepreneurship. Income can be irregular, dependent on opaque ranking systems and policy enforcement. Many supporting workers are informal contractors. A young creator can be, in effect, a micro-enterprise that nonetheless has limited negotiating power against the platform’s unilateral rule changes.
International comparisons again offer useful signals. The EU’s Platform Work Directive, agreed in 2024, aims to improve conditions for platform workers, including through rules that can help address misclassification and strengthen transparency around algorithmic management. The UK’s Supreme Court decision in Uber v Aslam affirmed worker status for drivers under UK law, reshaping entitlements. These are not directly about YouTube creators, but they illustrate a larger regulatory logic: when digital intermediation becomes a labour market institution, labour standards must evolve accordingly.
The ILO’s “decent work” definition is a useful compass here because it shifts debate away from “platform versus no platform” toward “what standards should apply to work mediated by platforms.” The objective is not to deny flexibility, but to ensure flexibility is not a euphemism for risk dumping.
Platforms Can Create Livelihoods—and Precarity
Why does this matter so much in India? Because inequality changes what “opportunity” means. In a context where wealth and income concentrate significantly at the top, platforms can offer real mobility for some, while also channelling the hopes and labour of many into systems where returns are uneven.
The World Inequality Report has documented a high concentration of income and wealth shares among top groups in India in recent years, and Reuters reporting on inequality research has amplified these findings in public discourse. The exact estimates vary by methodology and data sources, but the direction is difficult to dispute: a growing economy can still produce widening gaps if institutional design does not embed broad-based gains.
In such an environment, it is tempting to celebrate any large-scale opportunity engine- like the creator economy- as unambiguously positive. Yet economists Ha-Joon Chang and Dani Rodrik, known for their critiques of mainstream globalisation and advocacy for strategic industrial policies, would caution against that impulse for a reason: markets do not guarantee social outcomes; institutions do. When private platforms become gateways to visibility, revenue, and even learning, their governance becomes a public-interest question, whether we name it that or not.
The fundamental platform business model is also structurally expansionary: it seeks growth through deeper engagement, more data, and more monetisation opportunities. Without guardrails, that can produce “ruinous” outcomes- ruinous not necessarily in the dramatic sense of collapse, but in the quieter sense of normalising extractive practices: attention extraction, creator burnout, and a race-to-the-bottom for those without scale.
This is where the Cyberhub parable returns. The queue outside does not prove the model is healthy. It proves there is demand. The social question is whether the terms of access and the distribution of gains are legitimate. And this is why our stomachs churn.
What should Regulation then Aim For?
When Platforms Create Jobs—but Not Decent Work
If the objective is to retain the platform’s upside without romanticising it, regulation must be smart, enforceable, and targeted to the platform’s economic characteristics. Overregulation that treats YouTube like a factory will misfire. Under-regulation that treats it like a neutral pipe will also misfire.
A practical compact could include several elements.
First, transparency and due process in platform governance. When monetisation, reach, or content takedowns affect livelihoods, creators need clearer explanations, predictable rules, and credible appeals. The EU’s approach under the DSA provides one reference point in how transparency, recommender system accountability, and systemic risk mitigation can be formalised.
Second, baseline protections for platform-mediated work. India’s labour codes already signal a direction of modernisation and consolidation. The implementation question is how social security and protections extend to workers in non-traditional arrangements, including those in the broader creator supply chain- editors, junior crew, and service providers- many of whom resemble gig workers in practice. Internationally, the EU Platform Work Directive indicates that algorithmic management and classification questions are now mainstream policy issues, not fringe debates.
Third, child and youth safeguards commensurate with the platform’s role in education and entertainment. Evidence on youth mental health risks associated with social media is sufficient to warrant a precautionary, design-based approach: age-appropriate defaults, friction for late-night use, stronger controls against harmful content pathways, and better transparency for parents and educators- without undermining the educational utility that teachers themselves recognise.
Fourth, fair competition and creator bargaining power. The creator economy’s biggest asymmetry is that individuals negotiate with a platform that sets the rules. Collective representation models- adapted to digital contexts- can improve outcomes without eliminating flexibility. ILO’s emphasis on voice and social dialogue is relevant precisely because digital labour markets can otherwise become one-sided.
Finally, measurement discipline. The 2024 report’s GDP and jobs numbers are valuable, but policy should not rely on headline estimates alone. We need better granular data on income distribution among creators, volatility, hours worked, unpaid labour periods, and conditions in the ancillary workforce. This is where independent research partnerships, transparent methodologies, and periodic public reporting can shift debate from ideology to evidence.
India’s Creator Economy Needs Institutions, Not Illusions
The creator economy is now a material part of India’s labour-market imagination. The YouTube Impact Report for 2024 documents significant macro contributions and widespread use across education, small business growth, and cultural industries.
The platform is enabling livelihoods at scale, and for many young Indians, it represents a plausible route into income, identity, and participation in the public sphere.
But the same platform logic can also reproduce the uncomfortable truth embedded in the Cyberhub anecdote: when pricing, power, and automation concentrate, consumers keep queuing, yet workers’ conditions need not improve, and the system quietly normalises extraction. That is why the right question is not whether YouTube is “good” or “bad.” The right question is whether India’s growth model- including its digital growth model- is being governed so that value creation translates into decent work, healthier youth outcomes, and shared prosperity.
Rodrik’s institutional realism and Chang’s critique of market romanticism converge on a simple proposition: if markets are made, they can be remade. The task ahead is not to slow India’s creator economy. It is to ensure it grows on terms that are more human, more equitable, and more respectful of the social and ecological systems on which all economies ultimately depend.
The platform economy does not merely need reform. In some places, it needs reconstruction- so that its extraordinary capacity to create opportunity is matched by an equally deliberate capacity to create dignity. Only then will the parking rates not enrage the visitor.
*Dr Samar Verma, PhD, is a senior economist, public policy professional and an institution-builder, with 28 years of experience in economic policy research, international development, grant management, and philanthropic leadership. Views are personal.
