YouTube, an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google launched on February 14 2005, has witnessed increased channel growth and subscriber growth on its platform on an annual basis.
During this year’s YouTube Annual Roundtable virtual meeting, Mr Alex Okosi, Managing Director, Emerging Markets, YouTube EMEA, revealed the figures, saying Kenya’s content creation growth grew at the fastest rate year over year, at 70 per cent.
Okosi asserted that for the Kenya market, the percentage of YouTube channels making seven figures or more in revenue is up over 60 per cent year over year, with over 400 channels having over 100 thousand subscribers, which is an increase of over 70 per cent year over year, and six channels having over one million subscribers and one channel with over one billion views, while over 45 per cent of watch time on content produced by channels in Kenya comes from outside of Kenya.
In terms of YouTube African investments, Okosi stated that since the 2020 launch of the #YouTubeBlack Voices programme, creators from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa were selected to participate in programmes earmarked to help amplify their fresh narratives and highlight their intellectual power authenticity.
The streaming of YouTube has been dominated by mobile devices with 70% of watch time with daily watch time on mobile app devices averages more than 60 minutes. Despite having 300 channels and a combined subscriber base of 100,000, Nigeria and South Africa lag well behind Kenya in content offerings, including everything from cooking shows to music videos to travelogues and sporting events.
Among the Kenyan channels with over one million subscribers are:
Citizen TV with 3.17 million subscribers,
Churchill Show with1.95 a million subscribers,
KTN News with 2.19 million subscribers,
NTV Kenya, with 1.91 million subscribers,
K24 TV with 1.19 million subscribers,
The latest target is R&B singer Otile Brown with 1.08 million subscribers.
The numbers indicate that Kenya leads Africa in consuming its content, with a paltry 45 per cent of Kenyan content being consumed by a global audience.
Furthermore, Mr Okosi introduced the newly formed team to promote African content creation. He said that the Google-owned video streaming app had launched programs to assist producers in Kenya and Africa to improve the quality of videos on YouTube, thereby expanding.