Not sure if there is such a thing as the Indian movie industry. But pan India’s success of non-Bollywood movies like Bahubali, KGF, and RRR is definitely fueling the process of creating a unified Indian movie industry that is not Bollywood. Just to make it clear, Bollywood might be synonymous with Hindi movies but there can be Hindi movies that are not Bollywood. Now coming to the topic from the headline, Do you know how much the RRR’s YouTube revenue is? The team behind the RRR team that took care of promotions did a great job in making the movie producer D.V.V Danayya, S.S Rajamouli richer through monetization of trailers and videos on Youtube.No one is talking about this chunk of income from Youtube which is overshadowed by huge box-office collections across India.
RRR team used the Youtube content creators formula for success
At the time of the RRR movie’s first trailers on Youtube, the videos were not monetized. It was decided against Ads, instead, the RRR team used the paid promotions strategy. This is a widely used strategy among YouTubers to generate big incomes from their video content. As opposed to the Youtube Ads, here the video creators directly start or end the video with the sponsor’s details. For the RRR movie, it was mfine. Mfine is a remote doctor consultation app that was launched around the time of the RRR’s trailer release. Being a well-funded startup, mfine was able to pay enough for the RRR team to put a pause on Youtube ads.
This is a smart move from the RRR team because through paid promotions they were able to make substantial money while giving the Ad-free experience to the audience who were eagerly waiting for the release of the trailers. A win-win situation for everyone.
The number game in the context of RRR movie Youtube Ad revenue
It is easy for the experts to get box-office collections reports daily from the distributors, movie theaters, etc. However, this is not true when it comes to estimating the Youtube ads revenue. This data is with Youtube, which doesn’t share that information with anyone. The others with the relevant data are the marketing and trailer, merchandise, etc, and monetization companies like Mango Movies.
S.S Rajamouli and his team never missed a single opportunity to make money from every aspect of the movie including songs and trailers. This is understandable. From Rajamouli and the producer’s point of view, this project took a lot of money to make and they are not going to lose out on any revenue source. So the number game began on YouTube starting with first look teasers on the birthdays of the main cast in the movie like Jr. NTR and Ram Charan.
Being the Rajamouli movie it is, and the idea of multi-starer involving the two big names of Tollywood, RRR first look teasers got a million views just like that and to this date, it has garnered more than 70 million views. It was in November 2021 that the first look teaser with both Ram Charan and NTR was released.
D.V.V Entertainment and T-Series
D.V.V Entertainment YouTube channel now has 2.65 million subscribers. Remember RRR is planned as a multi-lingual movie from the day of production. The distribution of music videos was done through various Youtube channels, D.V.V Entertainment and Lahari Music are the leading channels for Telugu while Hindi distribution was done through T-Series. T-Series also uploaded videos on their regional language channels like T-Series Telugu, T-Series Malayalam, T-Series Tamil, etc.
Naatu Naatu song on Telugu channel Lahari Music might have made the most revenue with over 124 million views. Considering all the versions of Naatu Naatu song in all languages from various Youtube distribution channels, this number is more than 350 million views as a rough estimate.
How to estimate the Youtube Ad revenue for the RRR movie?
Now that we have some numbers, like 35o million views for Naatu Naatu songs, we can try and estimate the revenue from this song. But this is not easy owing to the various factors involved in YouTube ad targeting, competitors’ bidding, impression cost, etc. Let us not get into the digital marketing course now, all that needs to be understood is the same video played at different times of the day, in different languages, in different regions, fetch different prices for the ads.
We also need to know the average cost from 1000 ad views and clicks during the set period of time. We don’t have this data, however, based on the industry averages we can assume that an ad publisher is roughly paying 500-600 rs for thousand views. Assuming that 70% of the total song views had converted to ad views like in-stream ads, etc. A calculator can help you do this part and come to an agreeable number.
Whatever this number might be, this is just for one single song of the RRR movie. If we do this for every trailer and song along with other promotional tour videos etc, it is a number that no other Indian movie has seen so far.
All of this happened because of the RRR team that dedicatedly worked on monetizing these assets and the fame of two Tollywood big stars coming together under the umbrella of Rajamouli’s fame and success rate. As it stands, RRR movie’s Youtube Ad revenue and other un-traditional sources of making money on movie assets have set a new standard in the Indian movie industry. A definite case study for the aspiring.
