YouTube key to Google's India strategy

Google has a clear India strategy in mind and a large part of it is YouTube. Even though the Internet giant, which has had a tumultuous journey in India, with court cases and censorship issues, it still considers India strategic to its business, the company’s India head, Rajan Anandan was quoted saying in a Mint report .

The company’s India strategy will be five pronged: YouTube, where it continues to tie up with more partners to put up original content online; social media, where it wants to increase the presence of brands on Google plus; cloud offerings, which the company is looking to strengthen in India and get ahead of rivals such as Microsoft and Amazon, solutions for small and medium businesses (SMBs) where it sets up free websites for small businesses; and finally, its mobile strategy where it wants to gain prominence in the smartphone space with android and apps.

The Economic Times reported earlier thatIndia has the largest number of content uploaders inAsia for Youtube. And after the partner programme that Google launched in September last year, the number of Youtube users has grown to 31 million.

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A lot of original content from its partners gets uploaded making it an attractive proposition for advertisers.

The Mint report also notes Google’s plan to introduce TrueView -a feature which will help users reject the ad within five seconds.

With 20 million mobile-only Internet users inIndia, Google believes there is a sea of opportunity that can be tapped on the mobile front with the rising popularity of its android system and Google also wants to take existing products such as search, video, email and social media and get them ready for mobile.

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In the cloud space, Google will have to fight out rivals such as Amazon web services (AWS), Microsoft’s private cloud solutions players such as Salesforce.com for whom India is a big market. But by setting up free websites for SMBs, Google has a good start.

While it does enjoy the privilege of being an Internet behemoth, Google does have rivals in each of this space. What remains to be seen is how long will it be till India also becomes a battlefield.