A toddler somewhere in Jakarta taps a bright thumbnail. A cartoon boy with a tuft of hair starts singing. Nobody at a television network scheduled that moment. Nobody bought a slot. The child simply chose it, and will probably choose it again tomorrow.
Multiply that tap by a few billion, and you have the new economics of Indian animation.
For decades, an Indian animated character had one front door: the television screen. A studio made a show, sold it to a kids’ channel and waited for the ratings to trickle in. If the broadcaster said no, the character never saw daylight. That door is now half shut. Domestic commissions have thinned out, and the channels have grown cautious.
So the studios have built a new door of their own. It is shaped like a YouTube thumbnail.
What began as a place to dump old episodes has turned into something far more valuable. Indian studios now use YouTube to introduce characters, test stories, measure what children return to and carry their IP into languages and countries that no Indian channel could reach. The numbers have become too big to ignore. PowerKids Entertainment alone claims more than 32 billion lifetime views. Videogyan says its network has crossed 40 billion.
But the harder question is what a studio does with them. We spoke to seven of the country’s biggest players on the platform. Each is chasing the same prize by a different road.
Emomee: from a thousand fans to a billion views in 18 months
Emomee is the new kid on the block, and it is running fast.
In April 2025, its YouTube channel had 1,000 subscribers. By September 2026, it had more than 2.6 million, over a billion views and an audience spread across more than 100 countries. That is roughly 18 months from standing start to billion-view club. Few Indian IPs have moved that quickly.
The show is built around three characters called E, Mo and Mee. Its motto is entertainment first, learning underneath. The episodes are short and bouncy, pegged to the questions children ask all day long. Underneath the fun sit lessons on curiosity, confidence, resilience and emotional intelligence, along with money sense, critical thinking and a child’s first brush with technology and AI.
The old way of launching a kids’ show was slow and linear. Make a pilot, find a broadcaster, lock distribution and then wait months for audience data. Emomee flipped that. It put its characters straight in front of children and let the viewing numbers do the talking.
“YouTube is one of the fastest ways to test whether an IP can travel,” said Emomee founder and chief executive Pooja Jauhari.
The test appears to have worked. Emomee now has two shows on Netflix globally, and it is working on consumer products, live entertainment and licensing. It has been pitching at international markets such as Mipcom.
Jauhari is careful not to oversell the YouTube cheque. Revenue from the platform is still at an early stage. The real prize, she argues, is the equity being built in the characters. A view today is also an advertisement for the franchise tomorrow.
That franchise has a plan with a catchy label: the 3S strategy of Screen, Shop and Stage. Screen covers YouTube, streaming and syndication, and is where children first meet the characters. Shop takes E, Mo and Mee off the screen and into toy boxes and school bags. Stage puts them in front of families in live shows and musicals.
The company sees the business settling at roughly 40 per cent Screen, 40 per cent Shop and 20 per cent Stage. The roadmap has Screen and Shop scaling up in 2027, with a bigger push into live events from 2028.
The picture Jauhari paints is easy to imagine. A child spots E, Mo and Mee on YouTube, meets them again on Netflix, carries a plush Mo to bed and one day sits in a darkened auditorium watching them sing live. The ambition is to be a globally recognised children’s brand, not merely a well-watched channel.
Green Gold: Chhota Bheem finds a new generation
Green Gold TV went live on YouTube in 2011, back when digital was treated as a sidekick to television. The Hyderabad studio simply uploaded what it had. More than a decade on, the flagship channel has over 22 million subscribers, 11 billion views and more than 3,500 videos. It crossed 10 million subscribers in 2020 and collected YouTube’s Diamond Creator Award for it.
The big shift, says the company, is discovery. Television tied a show to a channel, a time slot and a country. YouTube tore up all three. A child can stumble on a Chhota Bheem song one afternoon, binge a compilation the next day and graduate to a full-length movie by the weekend. The character is available whenever the child wants him.
That has done wonders for the back catalogue. On television, an episode lived and died in its broadcast window. On YouTube it stays searchable for years. Episodes made long before today’s toddlers were born are still finding fresh fans. The strongman from Dholakpur is being introduced to a second generation of viewers without a single new commission.
Green Gold offers several ways in. There are full episodes and movies for the long sit, and songs, clips and compilations for a quick fix. Chhota Bheem shares the shelf with Mighty Raju, Super Bheem and Krishna.
The company does not disclose what YouTube earns it, and it does not treat the platform as a separate revenue line. Its digital business also includes apps, games and social media. YouTube is the shop window. The money is made in licensing, merchandising, gaming and films.
Green Gold’s own figures do carry a warning sign worth watching. Annual watch time on its channels slid from 191 million hours in 2021 to 147 million hours in 2025, even as the subscriber base kept climbing. Children are subscribing but spending less time per visit, a pattern consistent with the rise of short-form viewing. Holding attention is getting harder, even for a household name.
The studio’s next bet is to use YouTube earlier in the life of a new character. Try a character out online, watch how children react and then decide where to invest. Mighty Little Bheem proved on Netflix that an Indian toddler hero could charm viewers far beyond India. Green Gold now wants to find the next character that can make the same journey.
Reliance Animation: a channel for every audience
Reliance Animation has taken a department-store approach. Different floors for different shoppers.
Big Animation, the flagship channel, houses kids’ entertainment, mythology and superheroes. This is home to Little Krishna, Little Singham and Smashing Simmba. It has about 7.16 million subscribers, more than 3.19 billion lifetime views, over 1,500 videos and more than 71 million views a month.
Little Krishna on its own shows how long the tail of a children’s show can be. Its publicly identifiable views have crossed 1.34 billion, with several individual videos notching up tens of millions each. The blue-skinned boy god playing his flute in Vrindavan is still pulling crowds long after his television debut.
Big Story World caters to the whole family, with live-action stories, nostalgic classics and catalogue shows remastered in 4K. Little Kids Magic TV is for the youngest viewers, with nursery rhymes and early learning.
The studio is also making shows purely for YouTube, starting with a character-led original called Bhaiyyaji Balwan.
“Localisation is one of our big levers,” said Reliance Animation chief executive officer Tejonidhi Bhandare. The company plans to dub its key shows into several international languages. Going the other way, it is buying rights to bring selected foreign content into Indian languages. It is also building regional live-action and animation programming.
Bhandare is candid about the catch. Content marked, made for kids on YouTube cannot carry personalised ads, and some data-driven features are switched off. That puts a cap on advertising income. Premium animation costs serious money, and ads alone rarely cover the bill for new content.
The answer is to earn from as many places as possible. Reliance Animation stacks advertising alongside licensing, brand partnerships, syndication, music and merchandising. A character that becomes famous on YouTube can then earn in all those other places.
Behind the scenes, the studio has been retooling. It has built up 2D, 3D and Harmony-based production pipelines and is folding AI into development and production. The target over the next five years is digital-first characters and more regional-language shows. Each character would come with its own ecosystem of long-form videos, shorts and music.
Powerkids: one front door, many rooms
PowerKids Entertainment plays the portfolio game, and plays it at size.
Its channels carry a stable of children’s titles: The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, Dragonero and Young Achievers. The content mix swings between full episodes, compilations, Shorts, music and short clips built around individual characters.
The growth has been steep. Company figures show subscribers rising from 23.72 million in 2021 to 49.88 million in 2025, a jump of more than 110 per cent. Lifetime views rose from 11.84 billion to 29.76 billion over the same period, up 151.4 per cent. By September 2026 PowerKids TV stood at about 50.7 million subscribers and more than 32.36 billion views.
“With the proliferation of content, the challenge is no longer simply producing content,” said PowerKids Entertainment chief executive and managing director Manoj Mishra. “It is about getting discovered, building an audience, retaining that audience and creating a long-term relationship with viewers.”
Each format has a job. Shorts act as the flyer pushed through the letterbox, introducing a character to a stranger. Full episodes and compilations are the living room where the viewer settles in and stays. Mishra’s team watches which titles work in which formats and which countries, and packages content accordingly.
The trick is to pass the viewer from one room to the next. A child who comes in through Mowgli might wander over to Peter Pan, then to Robin Hood. PowerKids sketches the journey as acquire, engage, retain, monetise and build IP.
YouTube, in this model, is the reception desk of a much bigger building. Beyond it lie licensing, distribution deals, Fast channels and merchandising.
“YouTube gives us the audience,” said Mishra. “Our job is to turn that audience into enduring global IP.”
Videogyan: from nursery rhymes to AI-assisted IP
Videogyan Studios started where many Indian YouTube studios did: animated nursery rhymes and a cheerful sing-along.
The Bengaluru studio has since grown well beyond Twinkle Twinkle. It now owns a line-up of original characters: Baby Ronnie, TooToo Boy, Zool Babies, Demu Gola, Jack & Emilie and Baby Bluka. The output has widened from single songs to animated series, compilations, Shorts and longer viewing formats. What started as an English-language play is now spread across several Indian and international languages.
The scale is enormous. Across its network, Videogyan says its content has clocked more than 40 billion views, and several of its channels have crossed the Diamond Creator Award mark.
“There is more content being produced today than ever before, so the real challenge is no longer just production or distribution,” said Videogyan Studios founder and chief executive Vishal TM. “It is discovery and sustained audience attention.”
Vishal describes the shift simply. The studio used to make videos for YouTube. Now it builds IP through YouTube. Put a new character out, try a few treatments, watch the engagement and let that shape how the property develops.
The studio’s more striking move is its work with AI-assisted production. Vishal is at pains to stress that the goal is not to flood the platform with cheap clips. It is to bring down costs, try more ideas and iterate faster. The obvious payoff is in localisation. If a single episode can be reworked for a dozen languages at a fraction of the old cost, an Indian character can land in far more homes around the world.
Advertising still matters to the business. But the studio increasingly judges its success by the lifetime value of a character: licensing, OTT and AVOD distribution, apps and expansion to other platforms. The five-year aim is a portfolio of preschool characters that children around the world actively search for by name.
Toonz: dubbing its way across borders
For Toonz Media Group, the magic word is localisation.
Its YouTube network has more than 30 million subscribers and pulls in roughly five million views a day. The shelves hold Gummibär, the singing green bear, alongside Zoonicorn, Rat-a-Tat, Darwin & Newts and Cat & Keet. The mix spans animated series, short-form clips, music and regional-language programming.
India, with its patchwork of languages, taught Toonz an early lesson. Children stay longer with a story told in the language they hear at home. The company now applies that lesson in both directions.
A recent example is Rokuro, a Japanese children’s series that Toonz has brought to Indian viewers in Hindi on its digital platforms. The company is now talking to Planet Studios about carrying Rokuro into more markets and languages. A show that started in Tokyo could end up being watched in Lucknow and beyond.
Toonz has also leaned hard into data. It tracks where viewers drop off, which characters draw the most engagement and how behaviour differs from one market to the next. Those findings flow back into programming and distribution. The result is a feedback loop running constantly between the studio’s writers and its audience.
Like its peers, Toonz does not measure YouTube only by its ad cheque. The audiences it builds there feed licensing, merchandising, streaming, Fast channels and broadcast deals.
“Audiences will care less about where content originates and more about whether the content is relevant, engaging and available when they want it,” said Toonz Media Group chief executive Viswanath Rao.
Over the next five years, Toonz expects the lines between television, streaming, YouTube and Fast to blur almost completely. The company wants to be ready on every screen at once.
Cosmos-Maya: speaking a dozen languages
Cosmos-Maya has gone wide on languages and fast on Shorts.
Its content and dedicated channels are available in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi, Bengali, Punjabi, Gujarati and Kannada, as well as Indonesian, Spanish and Arabic, among others. The same character can crack a joke in Chennai, Kolkata and Madrid in the local tongue.
The numbers are big and steady. Company data puts views at about 7.38 billion in 2022, rising to 7.43 billion in 2023, 8.58 billion in 2024 and 8.62 billion in 2025. The channels rack up hundreds of millions of hours of watch time a year across long-form and short-form content.
The standout figure is in Shorts. Views on its short-form portfolio exploded from about 2.6 million in 2022 to more than 843 million in 2024. That is more than 300 times in two years. Few statistics capture more vividly how quickly children’s thumbs have moved to vertical video.
“YouTube has moved beyond its role as a digital distribution outlet to become a discovery, engagement and IP-building engine,” said Cosmos-Maya chief operating officer Dheeraj Berry.
The studio learnt that simply uploading television episodes was not enough. Content had to be repackaged, cut down, dubbed and optimised for how children now watch. A 22-minute episode might become a string of Shorts to hook new viewers, who are then steered back to the full story.
Berry sees YouTube increasingly as an audience intelligence platform. It tells the studio which characters, stories, formats and markets are working, and those signals feed into wider content decisions. The biggest change, he argues, is that an Indian animated character no longer has to start life on television. It can start on a phone screen and grow from there into a full-blown brand.
The catches nobody should ignore
For all the billion-view bragging, the model has fault lines.
The first is money. Children’s content on YouTube earns far less per view than adult content, because personalised advertising is switched off on videos made for kids. A billion views sounds like a fortune. Spread across a studio’s payroll and production costs, it is often a modest one. That is why every studio in this story talks about licensing and merchandise more than about AdSense.
The second is attention. Green Gold’s falling watch time and Cosmos-Maya’s Shorts explosion point in the same direction. Children are watching more but in smaller bites. A two-minute Short is a fine way to meet a character, but it is a poor way to fall in love with one. Studios need to find ways to walk viewers from the Short to the series.
The third is AI. It promises cheaper episodes and faster dubbing, and several studios are already using it. But a platform crowded with machine-assisted clips will make standing out harder, not easier. A character still needs a face children remember and a personality they miss when the video ends.
And finally there is dependence. Every one of these studios is building on land it does not own. One tweak to YouTube’s algorithm or advertising policy can change the economics overnight. Studios that are spreading their characters across Netflix, Fast, merchandise and live shows are the ones building a safety net.
The scoreboard
| Studio | Headline YouTube numbers (company-reported) | Key IPs |
|---|---|---|
| Emomee | 2.6 million+ subscribers; 1 billion+ views; 100+ countries | E, Mo and Mee |
| Green Gold TV | 22 million+ subscribers; 11 billion+ views; 3,500+ videos | Chhota Bheem, Mighty Raju, Super Bheem, Krishna |
| Big Animation (Reliance Animation) | 7.16 million subscribers; 3.19 billion+ views; 71 million+ monthly views | Little Krishna, Little Singham, Smashing Simmba |
| PowerKids TV | 50.7 million subscribers; 32.36 billion+ views | The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Robin Hood, Dragonero, Young Achievers |
| Videogyan | 40 billion+ views across network | Baby Ronnie, TooToo Boy, Zool Babies, Demu Gola, Jack & Emilie, Baby Bluka |
| Toonz | 9.23K subscribers; about 5 million views a day | Gummibär, Zoonicorn, Rat-a-Tat, Darwin & Newts, Cat and Keet |
| Cosmos-Maya (WowKidz) | 41.4M billion views; 24 billion + views (2022-24) | Multilingual kids and family portfolio |
The thumbnail is the new pitch meeting
Line the seven studios up and the strategies look very different. Emomee is building a brand-new franchise from scratch. Green Gold is giving a beloved old hero a second childhood. Reliance Animation is slicing its audience into neat channels. PowerKids is walking viewers from one classic to the next. Videogyan is betting on AI to scale its characters. Toonz and Cosmos-Maya are dubbing their way across borders.
What they share is a changed starting line. The question used to be which channel would air a show. Now it is whether a child will click on it, and whether that child comes back the next day.
For years Indian animators waited outside broadcasters’ offices with pitch decks under their arms. Today the first audition happens on a phone in a child’s hand, and the verdict arrives within weeks.
The studios that learn to turn those taps into toys, tickets and streaming deals will build the next Chhota Bheem. The rest will just have very large view counts.
