A foreign YouTube channel is suddenly dubbed in Vietnamese, sounds as good as a “TV series”: What is this strange thing?

Voiceover fever

In the spring of 2021, Farbod Mansorian traveled to North Carolina to present YouTube’s biggest star with an unexpected idea: to translate videos into Spanish.

Jimmy Donaldson, known on YouTube as MrBeast, hosts the fifth largest channel on the platform, with over 130 million subscribers. They follow the content in English.

Mansorian’s goal for MrBeast is to expand beyond the English confines through dubbing and repacking content for the remaining 87% of the world.

This idea was a resounding success. Mansorian’s company Unilingo put MrBeast on the production list a few weeks later — it now has similar deals with major channels like Dude Perfect, PewDiePie and Jubilee.

Mansorian estimates Unilingo has generated nearly $10 million for creators by re-releasing dubbed and circulating content in different languages.

According to YouTube, nearly two-thirds of a creator’s total watch time comes from outside the region. For Mansorian, the business opportunity was clear.

“If you pick the top 10,000 videos on YouTube by performance and dub them in more than 20 languages, you can easily unlock another half a trillion to a trillion views,” he told ROW.

Mansorian and his company are leading the social media dubbing industry, focusing entirely on creators.

In India, YouTuber Harsha Sai has gained 12 million more subscribers by dubbing videos from native Telugu to Tamil and Hindi.

The YouTube channels of Pokémon Asia Official (Hindi) and Pokémon Indonesia have attracted 15 million subscribers by uploading episodes dubbed in Hindi and Bahasa Indonesia.

9-year-old Russian YouTuber, Like Nastya, has created 9 different dub channels, expanding into Bahasa Indonesia, Korean and Arabic to reach over 100 million non-Russian subscribers.

Dubbing is becoming a global phenomenon instead of using subtitles like before.

Old but effective

” We just started doing this six months ago and it’s crazy that some of the videos have gone viral ,” MrBeast said on a podcast in March 2022, describing his Spanish-language channel MrBeast en Español currently has 23 million subscribers, with the most popular videos approaching 100 million views.

MrBeast is also a rare channel with Vietnamese dub videos nowadays. His videos were suddenly shared a lot on Vietnamese social networking sites, and at the same time created a fever of new views.

Unilingo typically charges an upfront translation fee and takes a 10% off future ad revenue from dub channels.

The company often pays a lot of money to famous voice actors. For MrBeast en Español, Mansorian hired one of the voice actors to do the Spanish dub for Spider-Man.

Unilingo has also signed Junko Takeuchi, who voices the main character in the Naruto anime series, as the Japanese voice for MrBeast.

YouTube has been developing systems that support multilingual content for many years. In 2021, Google began testing a feature that would allow viewers to choose between multiple dubbing options on a single video.

” The popularity of dubbing seems to reflect the audience’s need to dub YouTube content, ” said Seryun Lee, a research professor specializing in translation and intercultural studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. .

The market for translation services is growing rapidly. According to one estimate, this market could reach 47.21 billion USD by 2030, due to the high new demand from streaming services.

Telugu Harsha Sai, who just started working in late 2020, is one of the few Indian YouTubers to have dub content in multiple Indian languages. To reach Tamil and Hindi audiences, he launched two separate dubbing channels.

He also hired a family friend to run a voiceover studio to voice the videos.

Today, the cumulative subscriber count of Sai’s Tamil and Hindi dub channels is over 12 million, larger than his main Telugu channel of 8 million.