The YouTube Mafia: How 4 Channels Built a YouTube Monopoly in India

You know all those "independent" YouTube creators you watch? Turns out, a huge chunk of them aren't independent at all.

Vilfredo Pareto observed in 1896 that 80% of Italy's land belonged to 20% of the population. Fast forward to 2025, there’s a small group of 4 key players building a quiet empire on YouTube India, and they're on their way to controlling 80% of the content you see.

Think of Varun Maya (the infrastructure guy), Nikhil Kamath (the money guy), Tanmay Bhatt (the brand guy), and Rohit Kamath (the ops guy).

They aren't competing. They're interlocking puzzle pieces building a single machine. And they're doing it with a simple 4-step playbook.

Control the Talent, Don't Just Hire It

This is the most genius move. Instead of hiring expensive, hard-to-find video editors, they create them.

Varun & Achina Mayya's Aevy TV cohort trains over 100 editors every quarter. This has created an exclusive talent pool of over 3,000 graduates that competitors cannot access.

They literally manufacture their own workforce. This "talent pipeline" is self-funding from cohort fees, and the graduates get placed in top channels like Ali Abdaal, Blinkit, etc... or work on the network's own projects.

Sell the Factory, Not Just the Product

This pillar turns that talent into a scalable engine. With their army of editors, they don't just make their own content. They go to big brands like Zoho and essentially become their entire YouTube department.

It’s called YAAS: YouTube as a Service.

They create, script, produce, and manage an entire brand channel (like Builders Central) for them. The brand gets high-quality, genuine content, and the ecosystem secures high-ticket, long-term B2B revenue.

Buy the Vertical, Not the Ad Spot

This is where it gets crazy. They don't just buy ads on finance channels. Nikhil Kamath's Zero1 network funds the top finance creators.

They provide creators with $45k to $450k a year, plus a full 80-person production team to handle research, tech, and marketing.

They're not just sponsoring channels; they're controlling an entire, highly lucrative content vertical. Zero1 controls the creators, while YAAS controls the brands.

For context, Nikhil owns a SaaS known as Zerodha which is an online brokerage platform for stock trading and investing so they can easily shill it on these channels with owned distribution.

The Force Multiplier: Atomize Everything

This is how they guarantee reach. They don't just "post a video."

One 20-minute long-form video gets broken down into 50 different pieces of content—Shorts, Reels, carousels, threads. This omnichannel approach floods every platform (Instagram, LinkedIn, X, etc.) with high-quality content, maximizing the ROI on a single piece of research.

Build a Walled Garden

The era of the "lone wolf" creator is ending. The future of content is infrastructure.

This ecosystem works because it's a walled garden. A brand can enter via YAAS to build its channel, hire editors from the Aevy talent pool, and then commission a celebrity ad campaign from Moonshot.

Another company known as TheSoul Publishing Group has 2 billion subscribers on YouTube and they get 25 billion views per month. They own channels such as 5-Minute Crafts, Bright Side, 123 GO!, La La Life, Teen-Z, Slick Slime Sam, etc...

Once you see this, you can't unsee it. The pattern repeats itself from government to private companies to film industry to individuals. Yet another case of Pareto principle in action.

The real game is no longer about creating better content. It is about owning the system that creates the content.

Credits to Busy Funda for the insight.

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