Hello Newslaundry

Note- my letter is only 675 words.

I love you all of you in the hafta panel – Madhu ma’am, Niku, Ranga uncle, Manisha, Anand Vardhan, Atul Chaurasia and last but not the least missing Depanjana (everyone wants her back here).
Special love to Kartik for making it possible.

I wanted to write about many things about liberals, Right Left, religion and also criticise Niku on some issues. But, something struck me last week while I was seeing your YouTube channel. That was more important to me so, I am dealing with it here.

But, 1^st let me congratulate all of NL team to making such a great event- The Media Rumble success. I was there on both days on free pass, as I am a subscriber. The disappointment of not getting to watch Lipstick Under My Burqa was completely gone by seeing and also interacting with such wonderful people coming from all segments of Journalism and Administration.

For the last three days I was only thinking of some criticism, but did not find any important criticism apart from more space and more numbers of economical food stall (there was just one rest were costly).

I wish and pray NL grows and remains independent like it is today and I will always be a subscriber.

Now I have some observations to make. I am not sure if you guys earn from your YouTube channel but even if you do not you should take my observations seriously.

You have around 1000 videos (983 videos to be exact) in your channel and only 14 videos which have more than 100K views. Out of this 6 are from Madhu ma’am’s interviews (can you take it 5) and 4 from Niku’s interview (I agree 3). What I am trying to say is more interviews of that format should be continued. Other videos which have more than 50K views are from either Madhu ma’am’s or Niku’s interview. It is good that she resumed doing Clothesline. It also had good number of views. Do you know which of your videos have the highest views?

Make a guess. It is Dilip Mehta interview on his Sunny Leone Documentary (546,078 views). 2^nd is the Can You Take It Ravish Kumar (442,654 views). So, the guests also matter. But, it has to be a combination of both the guest and host.

If you compare your channels with others like that of Wire, Scroll, Quint etc. you are doing well. But, there is a channel called lallantop, it is ruling the YouTube among its peers of web based news. You should take some tips from Saurav Dwivedi.

I am not an expert on how to increase your views but I have presented some figures which might encourage you to revisit your old format of interviews. Numbers of views show that it was successful. You may choose to set aside by saying it’s inconclusive data. I as a subscriber felt you should look more into your YouTube channel.

One more thing. Can you take it with Karan Thapar could have surpassed all of these but you guys did not take care of it. See the link below and you will understand.

It has more than 600k views and you guys have 400k only. Yes, it the same video with copyright infringement. You can complain and it will be taken down. I was upset that no one even noticed it. Same video from an official page get less views than that from a random account.

So, please start taking good care of your YouTube channel. You can appoint some guys (part time) to take down copyright infringements also. YouTube can give you more exposure than anything else. Most of my friends recognise Newslaundry because of YouTube interviews/vidoes and my lecture to them about its ad free model. I have not been able to convince them to subscribe, but they have started consuming more of NL now.

Yours’
Rohit Vishal Pandey
(Twitter handle- @rv_pandey)