The first YouTube Festival Pakistan, held in Karachi and Lahore, tells advertisers that dramas, creators and Pasoori-sized hits can sell products, as Google builds on its new local office
LAHORE: Google brought its first YouTube Festival Pakistan to Lahore this week, pitching the country’s 60 million YouTube viewers to brands and advertisers as it looks to turn one of the platform’s fastest-growing audiences into a bigger advertising business.
The two-city event, held in Karachi on October 19 and Lahore on October 21, gathered brands, agencies and creators to make the case that YouTube can deliver both brand-building and measurable sales. It is the latest in a run of Google events in the country since the company opened its first Pakistan office in August, and its Lahore leg fell on the same day as Google’s Think Apps developer conference at Lahore Fort.
The numbers Google is selling
Pakistani channels uploaded 20 million hours of video over the past year, Google said, or about 38 minutes of new content every second. Around 60 million Pakistanis watch YouTube, and the company cited Pakistan Telecommunication Authority data showing 70% of Pakistanis have internet access. Google also described Pakistan as the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market by three-year compound growth.
The festival opened in Karachi with Coke Studio’s “Pasoori”, the Ali Sethi and Shae Gill Punjabi-language hit that last month became the first Pakistan-made music video to pass one billion YouTube views. Nearly 90% of those views came from more than 60 countries outside Pakistan, according to Google.
Television drama is the other export. Geo Television Network chief executive Mir Ibrahim Rahman said the network had reached 13 billion watch hours on YouTube, with 20 of its dramas each passing one billion views. “More than just numbers, it is a testament to the universal appeal of Pakistani storytelling,” he said.
“Pakistan is undergoing an unprecedented digital inflection point, and YouTube sits at the very heart of this transformation,” said Farhan Qureshi, Google’s Cluster Director for Pakistan, the Philippines, Thailand and Frontier Markets. “Following the official opening of our Google office in Pakistan, our focus is clear: to make YouTube as local as possible, for Pakistanis, by Pakistanis.”
From views to sales
The commercial pitch rested on case studies. Unilever’s Sunsilk used drama content to reach Generation Z audiences, while Nestlé Everyday built a Ramadan campaign around Sehri and Iftar programming and recorded 9.4% value growth and 4.8% volume growth, according to the companies’ figures presented at the event.
Digital bank easypaisa scaled Google’s Demand Gen campaigns across YouTube, targeting audiences from cricket fans to drama viewers. A Google causal impact study estimated a 30% relative lift in app installs, or about 1.3 million additional installs. “Through Demand Gen, we have not only driven incremental app installs but also strengthened daily customer engagement,” said Hani Hassan, head of growth and analytics at easypaisa Digital Bank. The campaign rides a wider shift in which nine in ten payments through Pakistan’s banks are now digital.
Google also promoted Creator Media Bundles, which package placements around popular creators, and Partnership Ads, which let brands amplify creators’ own content with paid media.
The Lahore leg
In Lahore, the creator spotlight fell on travel vlogger WildLens by Abrar, who spoke about taking Urdu- and Punjabi-speaking audiences across borders through travel storytelling, and Menahil Temur of the explainer channel Minoqtopus, who described building an audience by breaking down complex subjects in depth. Pepsi’s Ayesha Khan joined them to discuss how brands should balance their own assets with creator content, a conversation held in Karachi with Unilever’s Humza Mahfooz.
Lahore has become a regular stop for global tech companies this month, hosting Google’s developer event, the PUBG Mobile Global Open and a growing community of digital workers. Young Lahoris have increasingly turned to online earning and freelancing, and IT services exports reached $4.6 billion last fiscal year.
Big advertisers, close access
Google’s relationships with its largest Pakistani advertisers go well beyond festival stages. A source at Zameen.com, the Lahore-headquartered property portal, told The Lahore Times that the company is one of Asia’s biggest advertisers on Google Ads, and that Google’s team frequently visits to meet Zameen.com representatives and guide them before any update or ranking issue arises. The source spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to speak to the media.
“If we do anything wrong, it is Google, whose team visits and meets us frequently, that guides us on what to do next and what not to do,” the source said. The company’s in-house team learns from that guidance and implements it on the website, the source added, so that the portal “won’t be penalised or de-ranked ever.”
The Lahore Times could not independently verify the source’s account, including Zameen’s ranking among Asian advertisers. Zameen.com and Google have not publicly commented on the claims.
The two companies’ ties are on the public record. In December 2022, a Google team led by its Asia-Pacific industry manager, Markus Fischer, visited Zameen’s Lahore head office, where he described the portal as “a key client of Google in Pakistan”, according to Zameen’s own news site.
Dedicated account teams that advise large advertisers on running their paid campaigns are standard practice across the digital advertising industry. The source’s suggestion that such access protects a site’s organic search rankings, however, runs counter to Google’s stated policy. Google says that “no one can buy better placement in organic Search results” and that “advertisers are also not given special advantages or ranking boosts”, keeping its advertising and search ranking systems separate.
For smaller Pakistani businesses, publishers and property portals competing with Zameen for search traffic, the question of whether big spenders enjoy closer access to Google is likely to resonate, particularly as the company courts more local advertisers through events such as the YouTube Festival.
What the pitch leaves out
For creators, the economics remain uneven. Banks began deducting a 5% withholding tax from YouTube and AdSense payments to tax filers, and 10% for non-filers, under this year’s Finance Act, cutting into earnings that are often modest outside the top tier of channels. Many Pakistani creators also complain that advertising rates for Pakistani audiences are far lower than for viewers in Western markets.
The relationship has not always been smooth. Pakistan blocked YouTube entirely from 2012 to 2016 over a controversial video, and platforms continue to face content takedown requests and periodic internet disruptions that can hit creators’ reach and income.
The festival also did not disclose how much Pakistani advertisers spend on YouTube. Industry figures have historically shown digital advertising as a small, though fast-growing, share of Pakistan’s total ad spending, with Facebook and Google taking most of it.
Google said more than a decade of investment and its new country office would help Pakistani advertisers connect cultural understanding with measurable growth. Whether brands shift more of their budgets from television to YouTube, and whether that money reaches the creators producing those 20 million hours, will determine how much of the platform’s growth turns into Pakistani earnings.
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