Discussion of digital media in South Asia is disproportionately about English-language products, because that's what the people writing about it consume.
The actual consumption is overwhelmingly in other languages, and the gap between where the audience is and where the attention goes has been one of the more consistent features of the market.
The scale
English is spoken by a minority of the population, concentrated in urban and higher-income groups. The majority of internet users consume primarily in a regional language.
As internet access has expanded beyond the initial urban base, that proportion has shifted further. Each successive cohort of new users has been less English-oriented than the last.
The consequence is that growth in digital consumption has been substantially in non-English content, and any product strategy oriented around English is addressing a shrinking share of the market.
What happened first
Video led, for a straightforward reason: it doesn't require literacy.
Video and audio content in regional languages found enormous audiences among users for whom reading in any language was a barrier. That's a large group and it was almost entirely unserved before cheap data.
Short-form video accelerated this dramatically. The format requires no reading, works on modest devices, and the recommendation systems surface content in whatever language a user engages with, which means language sorting happens automatically without anyone building a strategy for it.
The monetisation lag
The persistent problem. Audience growth in regional languages has far outpaced revenue.
Several reasons. Advertising rates track the purchasing power of the audience, and regional-language audiences skew towards lower income brackets, so rates are lower.
Advertiser familiarity matters too. Media buying teams are frequently English-oriented and less comfortable evaluating content they can't assess directly, which produces a systematic under-allocation relative to audience size.
And measurement is weaker. Audience data for regional-language digital content has historically been less robust, which makes advertisers cautious.
The gap has narrowed as the audience has become too large to ignore, and it remains substantial.
The subscription question
An interesting divergence. Subscription models have found traction in some regional markets, particularly for video, more readily than the income data would predict.
The explanation appears to be that content genuinely unavailable elsewhere commands willingness to pay, whereas content that's substitutable doesn't. Regional-language originals with no alternative source have performed better than general catalogues.
Pricing has had to be radically different. Successful regional subscription products have been priced at a fraction of international equivalents, with mobile-only tiers and short-duration options that don't exist in other markets.
Production economics
The structural advantage that makes this work: regional-language production costs are substantially lower than English-language or international production.
Which means a regional original can be profitable at audience sizes that wouldn't support an expensive production, and platforms have discovered they can commission a great deal more content per unit of budget.
Several regional film industries have long-established production ecosystems with experienced crews and talent, so the capability exists — it's not being built from scratch.
The consequence has been a substantial increase in regional-language production, and some of it has crossed over into wider audiences through subtitling, which has been one of the more notable developments in the last several years.
The dubbing effect
Worth noting because it changed the market. Content produced in one language and dubbed into several others has become standard, and it works better than the industry expected.
Audiences have shown considerable willingness to watch dubbed content, and platforms report significant proportions of viewing for major titles happening in languages other than the original.
This creates an interesting dynamic: a production's addressable audience is no longer bounded by its language, which changes the commissioning calculation and has raised budgets for content that can travel across the country.
What's still underbuilt
Several areas where the infrastructure hasn't caught up with the audience.
Text and news. Regional-language news online has grown and quality varies enormously, and the economics are worse than for video. Local journalism in regional languages faces the same collapse in advertising revenue as everywhere else, without the scale to compensate.
Search and discovery. Search behaviour in regional languages, including transliterated queries, is imperfectly served. A user typing a regional language phonetically in Latin script is doing something that text matching handles poorly.
Payments and interfaces. Financial and commercial products remain disproportionately English-first, which is a genuine access barrier for exactly the users being targeted for growth.
Those gaps are where the next expansion probably sits, and they're less visible than content because they're infrastructure rather than product. Which is roughly the same reason the whole regional-language story took so long to get noticed in the first place.
The creator economics
One consequence of the revenue gap that shapes what gets made. A creator producing in a regional language with a large audience frequently earns less than one producing in English with a much smaller one.
That drives some creators towards English despite their natural audience being elsewhere, and it means the content available in regional languages is disproportionately made by people who can afford lower returns.
Brand partnerships have partially closed the gap, because advertisers targeting specific regional markets will pay for genuine reach there, and those deals are negotiated directly rather than through platform advertising rates.
Which has produced a slightly odd situation where direct sponsorship is more important to regional creators than platform monetisation, and where the creators who succeed are those with the commercial skills to negotiate rather than simply the largest audiences.