How viral comic acts, AIB & TVF, are making good business in a category known for one-man acts

Almost everybody wants to be an entrepreneur and the three central characters in Pitchers, a new web series from The Viral Fever (TVF), tries to capture this adrenaline soaked journey of entrepreneurship in India. When asked to spell the word entrepreneurship, a character gets to the first three letters before telling his hesitant friend: “Entrepreneur banney ke liye spelling nahi chahiye yaar, spirit chahiye [you don’t need to know your spellings, you need to have spirit to become an entrepreneur].”

For Arunabh Kumar, founder of TVF, this statement is perhaps autobiographical. TVF started as a one-person company when Kumar, an IIT Kharagpur graduate, went from disenchantment with a career in aerospace in Mumbai to working as an assistant director on smash Bollywood hit Om Shanti Om and then on bathroom humour-laced comic caper Delhi Belly.

However, when he attempted to turn entrepreneur, Kumar ran into a brick wall, made up of inert entertainment TV channel bosses. A video he put together in 2009, Engineer’s Diary, faced a round of rejections from all the youth TV channels, so he turned to YouTube (with some refinement from friend and partner at TVF Amit Golani) to try his luck.

Atentative attempt to go online turned into a goldmine — Engineer’s Diary became the second most-watched entertainment video that week — and since then TVF has devised a series of smash hits online. TVF’s Barely Speaking with Arnub, Rowdies, Gangs of Social Media, Emotional Atya-Charge, ‘Permanent Roommates’ and ‘Breaking Good’, among a host of others, have recorded over a million views each online.

Brand alliances are being worked out to bring in revenue. For Permanent Roommates, for which TVF has tied up with online realty startup Common-Floor, it expected a million views at best — it has so far got over nine million.

TVF has worked with Freecharge (an online recharge venture recently acquired by Snapdeal) to launch Emotional Atya-Charge, which also had over a million people logging onto YouTube.

Most recently, it tied up with Kingfisher beer to launch Pitchers, which has quickly gone viral, with the first episode viewed almost 3,00,000 times in five days.

Kumar is one of the top seven executives at TVF to have graduated from IIT and he hopes to bring some engineering rigour to an otherwise creative — and chaotic — field of content creation. Their brand of humour, branded Qtiyapa, has gone from strength to strength and TVF has racked up around 100 million views on YouTube for all its content. Kumar is clear that he doesn’t want to build just a comic entertainment venture but something more.

“Mainstream TV channels have forgotten what the youth want to see…their content is stale and unappealing,” says Kumar. “We have revolutionised the market and want to be the Disney or HBO of this space.”

Since its founding in 2010, TVF has morphed into a 100-person outfit with businesses such as TVF-ONE (Online Network for Entertainment), Branded Entertainment, TVF Live, Production Labs, Drama and Play. Kumar says he will raise a “significant amount of funding” for TVF-ONE in the next two or three months.

Kumar has split the company into several businesses. TVF Media Labs is the parent company. TVF-ONE is the online vertical that includes the network of five YouTube channels, TVF Play, TVF Inbox Office and the social media platforms. TVF-LOL (Live Out Loud) does live shows popular as TVF College Night Out. Headed by Vipul Goyal, TVF Tube handles television projects. TVF MC BC (Marketing Content and Branded Content) makes videos for brands. And finally TVF Studios is a movie vertical.

A Serious Source of Business

What started as a small office in Mumbai’s Versova suburb, an entertainment hub of sorts, has grown into two offices (one is packed to the brim with creative talent), even as the firm looks to leverage five years of serious work in online comedy to make a bigger splash in multiple formats and to use this experience to build content across formats.

In a cramped, bare office in Versova, Kumar is busy between a steady stream of visitors, a constantly ringing phone and a calendar with at least a dozen appointments. Besides an Apple laptop and his phone, there are few signs of personalisation but plenty of indications of pace. Outside his rickety cabin, the office itself is almost empty, as most employees have moved to a new neighbouring office, which is already packed.

Comedy, once a lightly regarded form of entertainment, is now becoming a serious source of business, a shift exemplified by TVF and more recently All India Bakchod (AIB), a three-year collective that has taken the offline and online world by storm. While the internet has played a central role in the explosion of their popularity, the rise of comedy as a means of communication has enabled them to look beyond their staple fare to build a more meaty business.

In contrast to the ever-expanding size of team TVF, the foursome who run AIB prefer to keep things small — and tight. The comedy venture has barely a dozen full-timers. Employees are hired if they can multitask.

Scriptwriters will work on editing and postproduction. It helps that AIB’s business is run by creative hot shop Only Much Louder (OML), freeing Gursimran Khamba, Tanmay Bhat, Rohan Joshi and Ashish Shakya to focus on the creative side.

From its roots of devising podcasts, AIB has grown to become a mustwatch online too. Its videos such as Alia Bhatt Genius Of The Year, Rape — It’s Your Fault, Dhoom 3 Parody and The Great Indian Media Circus have all been smash hits online.

“The growth has been phenomenal in the last 12 to 18 months… our business has increased almost 300 to 400%,”says Bhat. “We are now taking startup life more seriously, with a brand new team in place and focus on new business.”

No Precedent in Business

Vijay Nair, a cofounder of OML, thinks AIB needs to look beyond its roots in podcasts and (viral) YouTube videos if it is to build a sustainable business. “YouTube helped build a strong brand for AIB, but there is much more they can do,” he says. “They need to use this to expand their own unique content and graduate into longer shows and do more serious work with big brands.”

Bhat and the others at AIB are acutely aware that millions of YouTube videos alone won’t keep this comedy gravy train running for long. To try to broaden AIB’s revenues, the outfit has increased its involvement with brands (its work with Red Bull called Red Bull Flugtag was a hit), and wants to evolve into something on the lines of a digital creative outfit — even if Bhat shies away from being branded an ad agency. “We get 30-40 enquiries a week from corporates…it is just a question of us having the bandwidth to keep pace with this surge in business,” says Bhat.

AIB has built a strong brand with its comic content — both offline and online. While the founders Khamba and Bhat started with their podcasts on current affairs (including conversations with fellow comics such as Raju Srivastava, Russell Peters and Bollywood names such as Anurag Kashyap and Ranvir Shorey), they also became standup stars.

“Every sketch we have done has over 1.5 million views…we have had to find our own way to this point and will need to chart our own path going forward, since there is no precedent in this business,” Bhat says. “We want to evolve into a content agency and we have already signed up with five or six brands,” After podcasts and online and live content, branded content will be AIB’s third business unit.

AIB grew from open-mic events (where wannabe comedians try out their lines and hope for a few laughs) to regulars at 300-seater auditoriums. In the last six to 12 months, AIB has filled out 1,000-seater or larger halls for events such as its own branded ‘Royal Turds’ show. It has earned Rs 3 crore in revenue from live events, with its Royal Turds comedy festival earning Rs 1.5 crore.


“We are having a lot of fun with comedy, but there will be a time when we want to do more,” admits Bhat. “We didn’t think we would get this far, but the numbers we’re getting online [12 million for the now infamous roast] prove our popularity and we want to build on it.”

Industry experts say these units and comedy itself are disrupting the brand and content building business by giving companies a new — and rapidly growing — method to connect with consumers. “TVF has evolved into the first source of entertainment for Indian youth everywhere…they have single-handedly fought the regressive content on youth channels,” says Josy Paul, chairman and chief creative officer of BBDO India, an advertising agency.

“They have taken comedy, especially the spoof, mainstream.” Brands also connect with TVF and AIB because they break a certain formality (and rigid morality) linked with TV channels and instead use a two-pronged approach of comedy and social media to target consumers. “With this combination it is almost as if brands chill out, have a couple of drinks and relax,” adds Paul.

Both TVF and AIB have built their businesses using comedy as the star attraction, but have used different routes to reach the same viral point. TVF is the older name, having grown from its Qtiyapa roots into a multipronged entertainment enterprise. It is now pitching itself to expand into new, more serious categories. AIB, on the other hand, made its mark with standup comedy before churning out successive comic hits online.

As they seek to break new ground, both startups will need to edge out of their comfort zones and experiment with something new. In Pitchers, TVF’s attempts at breaking this mould; episode one begins with a quote from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: “The biggest risk is not taking any risk…in a world that is changing very quickly the only strategy that is guaranteed to fail is not taking risks.” The founders of TVF and AIB would have noted that.