A few months ago, the two people behind Chintu & Bubu noticed that animated characters were doing unusual numbers on Instagram and decided to build a pair of their own. The Instagram page is now at 36,000+ followers across 70+ posts, some of its reels have crossed millions of views, and some of the notable brands the page has worked with include NoBroker, Cloud9 Energy Drink and Apsara Ice Cream.
- Chintu & Bubu is only about four months old. Where did the idea come from?
- The page has 36,000+ followers and 70+ posts in four months. Most creators do not get there that fast. How are you reading those numbers?
- Where is the revenue coming from right now?
- When did the first brand deal come in?
- What does an AI creator with 36,000+ followers charge for a brand collaboration?
- Some of your reels have crossed 10 to 20 million views. Does Instagram push AI-generated content?
- Anyone can ask an AI tool for cute animated characters. What makes Chintu & Bubu difficult to replicate?
- What’s next for Chintu & Bubu?
The characters’ small arguments are inspired straight from the creators‘ own relationship, but the people behind them have chosen to stay anonymous. What is on record instead is how quickly they have worked out the commercial mechanics behind an AI page: pricing each deal off-page insights rather than a rate card and building Chintu and Bubu as fixed, recognisable characters rather than a one-off animation style anyone could copy.
The creators spoke to TCI about the AI channel’s growth and the business behind it. Read the conversation along.
Chintu & Bubu is only about four months old. Where did the idea come from?
We spend a lot of time on Instagram watching what is trending, and we noticed that animated characters and animated reels were getting popular. That made us think about creating something of our own using animated characters. But Chintu and Bubu are not just random cute characters. The stories come from two real people, which is us. A lot of the situations are inspired by our own relationship and the things that happen between us. Also, we wanted another interest outside work and to build something around it. That is one of the reasons we started Chintu & Bubu.
The page has 36,000+ followers and 70+ posts in four months. Most creators do not get there that fast. How are you reading those numbers?
We have achieved good numbers, but numbers are not our primary focus. Our main focus is making every piece of content highly shareable and overloaded with cuteness. The moment someone sees Chintu or Bubu, they should know which page the content has come from and want to check whether we have uploaded any new reels.
Followers are increasing, which is obviously good, but we don’t want to restrict ourselves to simply increasing followers and entertaining the audience. We are also thinking about brand collaborations and IP management. We want to develop Chintu and Bubu as recognisable character IPs, so both audiences and brands can identify them. That is our larger vision and we are working towards it.
Where is the revenue coming from right now?
At the moment it is mainly brand collaborations. Some of the notable brands we have worked with include NoBroker, Cloud9 Energy Drink and Apsara Ice Cream. We have done other collaborations as well, and there are a few more in the pipeline.
When did the first brand deal come in?
Around two months after we started. It was Apsara Ice Cream. They approached us when we were at 12K followers. At that point we were also looking for opportunities, because we wanted to understand what we could do commercially and what the potential of the page was. Instead of making the ad feel like a generic one, we integrated the brand into the Chintu & Bubu storyline.
What does an AI creator with 36,000+ followers charge for a brand collaboration?
We don’t really have one fixed commercial rate. We look at our page insights, things such as the number of followers, the views the content receives and the overall performance of the page. We can also use AI tools such as ChatGPT to understand a possible commercial range based on those inputs. So we can give the tool our follower count, average views and other insights and use that as one input while deciding what rate makes sense.
Some of your reels have crossed 10 to 20 million views. Does Instagram push AI-generated content?
Instagram does give AI content a push if the performance metrics are good. One thing we pay a lot of attention to is the duration of the reel. Generally our reels are quite short, often around 10 seconds. For collaborations the duration may vary depending on the requirement. People don’t necessarily want to spend a lot of time on a single reel, so the first few seconds are extremely important. If they don’t find something interesting immediately, they will scroll to the next one.
We track what we call the skip rate, and we try to keep it below 30%. If the skip rate stays low and people continue watching and sharing the content, the chances of Instagram pushing the reel increase. That is why the short duration is intentional. We want to generate the hook within the first few seconds and keep the important performance parameters under control.
Anyone can ask an AI tool for cute animated characters. What makes Chintu & Bubu difficult to replicate?
That is exactly why we have created fixed characters. Normally someone could tell an AI tool to create an animation using some cute characters and tell a story, and it would design new characters and generate a video. Whereas we have fixed the visual identity of Chintu and Bubu and we repeatedly use the same characters so they become recognisable.
Chintu has two symmetrical hair buns. That is one of her signature characteristics. Bubu has puffy hair, which is part of his signature look. We maintain these visual characteristics consistently, so even if somebody creates something similar, people who know Chintu & Bubu should be able to identify our original characters. That consistency helps us build the characters as an IP rather than generating random animated people for every reel.
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What’s next for Chintu & Bubu?
Our larger vision is to take Chintu and Bubu beyond Instagram and develop them as character IPs. We want to explore long-term brand partnerships and licensing opportunities and eventually build long-form animated content around the characters. Instagram is where the journey has started, but the goal is to build Chintu & Bubu into something that can live across formats and platforms.
