In an important announcement made for users and artists of Pakistan, Google on Tuesday said that it is launching a ‘YouTube Partner Programme’ in the country which will allow video creators to make money for their original work, reported Mashable.
This comes as an exciting development for the local artists in a country where entertainment industry is fairly small.
Any Pakistani creator — even if they have only one original video — can become a “partner” and start making money. These partners will be able to run ads against their videos.
YouTube will split the revenue generated by those ads, and pays its partners.
Popular Pakistani rapper and comedian Ali Gul Pir explaining the matter to Mashable said: “YouTube for Pakistan before the ban was a glimmer of hope as we did not even have a single record label in the country. So musicians and artists only had YouTube and that’s where I released my first song as well, It got over 3 million views.
“It made my career but then YouTube was banned and we were back to zero. I still made content but we would use Twitter and Facebook to show the work, and frankly that didn’t work well because those platforms are not made for content creators.”
Google also introduces the offline video viewing feature which has been particularly popular in emerging countries where many face connectivity issues.
Using this feature, a user can go to YouTube app and save a video for later viewing. The video will be with saved for 48 hours after downloading it.
“We are delighted to launch this new offline experience on YouTube with some of the top Pakistani players in entertainment. By making these popular videos available for temporary offline viewing, our partners will help fans connect more easily with their favourite content, while also helping bring more viewers to their videos,” said Tania Aidrus, Head of Business Development, Next Billion Users team at Google Asia Pacific.
Months after the Pakistan lifted its three-year-old ban on the site, people have once again begun turning to Google’s video service for consuming and creating videos.
Pakistanis are now spending substantially more time on YouTube than they were in January, the company told Mashable. Google says the watch-time of YouTube has more than doubled in eight months.
