Back in 2019, I started using Google Trends and various analytics tools provided by them. They are insightful and useful. I am sharing a post I wrote 3 years back.
Dhinchak Pooja
Many from my generation would not know who Pooja Jain is. Our kids know her as Dhinchak Pooja. She is a girl from Delhi who makes amateurish videos and posts them on Youtube. Her songs have pathetic lyrics (if one dared to call them lyrics) and her voice quality is amongst the worst (bathroom singers included).
Pooja launched her first nonsensical video in 2014-15. Nobody noticed her. However, she suddenly shot to fame in 2017. Her videos have since then been viewed by more than 30 million people and most of them have posted nasty comments on them. Yet the viewership ensured that she got an Rs.700,000 cheque from Google for one of her videos and she secured an entry in Big Boss and Indian Idol apart from other reality shows on India TV.
But this post is not about Dhinchak Pooja and her accomplishments. I was intrigued by 2 questions: 1. What made people view her videos? 2. Why a rise in her popularity in 2017 and then a downturn since 2018? For answering this question, I used information in Google Analytics.
What made Pooja click and fail?
Conventional wisdom shows that for a video to get popular on Youtube it has to have engaging content, a call to action, good background music, tags, etc. None of these ingredients exist in Pooja's videos. Therefore, I looked at who was predominantly watching her videos in the initial phase. It turns out that in 2017-18 most of her viewership came from people in the age group of 16-25 years. For this group to be able to access her videos, data had to be cheap. As you would note from the chart below, India's ever-existing interest in Data Plans shows two spikes - one around September 2016 and then in March 2017. Incidentally, Jio entered the market on Dec 2, 2016, and offered free data till Mar 31, 2017. Thereafter, it simply held its low rates till now. From May 2017, Pooja's video started becoming viral and peaked in Aug 2017. So, one of the possible reasons for more people viewing her videos was low access cost.
Seth Godin in his book - All marketers tell stories - has advocated that you need to focus on one group of people who are interested to listen to your story. Once they get hooked they tell the story to others and then it spreads. Malcolm Gladwell calls it a tipping point. The same phenomenon happened in the case of Pooja and people of other age groups started viewing the videos.
I further analyzed the data to check when her videos got maximum viewership. Surprisingly, her videos are watched most often between 1:30 and 2:30 am and the numbers peak on weekends. Considering the age group of 16-25 and looking at the time when they engaged with this content, I was intrigued to check which other sites this group would be interested in. It was no surprise to find that Pornhub and Dhinchak Pooja's viewership peaked at the same time of the day!
Suddenly, the data paints a different story. Here are young guys/gals sitting all by themselves, alternately viewing pornhub and dhinchak pooja. They are simply killing time and remaining awake. If this interpretation is right then we are sitting on an epidemic of loneliness, social disconnect, and sleep deprivation. This correlates well with the data published by Fitbit. As per their analysis, on average, Indians sleep only 6.55 hours. Most of the Fitbit users who wear their band 24x7 are from the same age group that watches Dhinchak Pooja. We need to really worried about this trend.
The answer to my second question - Why did Pooja's craze fade away - turned out to be simpler. Pubg is replacing all other online addictions. Since 2017 it has taken off and is showing no signs of abating. The worst part about Pubg is that its addition is not restricted to midnights. It is more or less uniformly spread across the day.
The data I have used is available in the public domain. It is generic in nature. A better approach would be to validate it with microdata - checking what our kids do in the night - of course by taking them into confidence and not by policing over them.
PS: As per the trends NE of India is getting hooked on this online stuff more than the rest of India. Have the telecommunication networks improved there recently? I don't know. Need another post to study that!
- Subodh
Comments