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One YouTube channel helps a South Asian village
SUNDAY STORY
How a “YouTube Village” Grew in Bangladesh
AroundMeBD
Google “Shimulia, Bangladesh” and the search engine can’t pull up more than 71 results. It’s a small village in Southeast Asia but one creator has put it on the map.
Liton Ali Khan started AroundMeBD, a YouTube channel that documents rural cooking practices in his home village. The videos show a community kitchen in Shimulia preparing huge amounts of food, including a 185-pound vanilla cake, 800 tandoori rotis, and a 650-pound water buffalo to feed the 4,000+ villagers. Since starting the channel five years ago, it has amassed over 4 million subscribers.
Khan lives in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where he owns an internet cafe. He runs the channel with his uncle Delwar Hosseein who lives in Shimulia and travels more than six hours from the village to the internet cafe to transfer video from a memory card to a computer for editing and uploading. They upload around eight times a month, and have garnered over 1.3 billion views.
Shimulia has earned the nickname “YouTube Village” as the channel employs 50 villagers, 17 of whom are women who are featured in and run the show. Staff plan the shoots and manage the crowds that come to eat as well as delegate responsibility. One chef, 70-year-old Jobeda Khatun, has been featured in over 100 of the channel’s videos.
She told the journalism nonprofit Rest of World that her earnings from the channel help her afford the medicine for her diabetes and feed her family. The channel also gives the opportunity for villagers to eat foods that would normally be hard to afford, like swordfish and buffalo tongue.
Revenue has gone toward medical expenses for the village’s elderly, rehousing those whose homes were lost in a fire, and building a water slide and park.
Our Take
YouTube channels can be economic drivers not just for individual creators but in some cases a whole community. And when you build an audience on the world stage, it drives awareness that can turn an unknown village into a must-see destination.
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