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Bongani Ndlovu, Chronicle Reporter
Video sharing site YouTube has opened up the world to many people and local YouTubers are telling the Zimbabwean story through the medium.

Around the world there has been a rise of YouTubers, defined as an individual who produces videos on the video-sharing platform YouTube.

The top YouTube channel in terms of subscribers is from India called T Series with 203 million subscribers. The top YouTuber, in terms of subscribers, is PewDiePie (110 million subscribers).

In Africa, Oum Walid, meaning Walid’s mother, is the biggest YouTube channel with 9,18M subscribers.

Oum Walid specialises in presenting to its viewers the best cooking recipes and simple cooking techniques to beginners and women alike. Every month, the revenue generated from this channel is about $217 700.

In Zimbabwe, in particular Bulawayo, there are a number of channels that give the world a glimpse of the country’s cultural hub.

One such channel, Magriza Made Me Cook that is being run by Prince Sivalo Mahlangu is aimed at showing the different traditional cuisines in Zimbabwe.

Mr Mahlangu said the channel, which has over 8 000 subscribers, was inspired by his grandmother’s immense knowledge in preparing traditional meals.

“My YouTube channel is called Magriza Made Me Cook and its main aim is to document Africa’s diverse food cultures, one dish at a time.

Based on this, the show also seeks to capture different cultural knowledge systems that are used in line with African food, stories, music to note but a few.

The channel also shows content about places to travel and visit in Zimbabwe,” said Mr Mahlangu.

“Setting up the channel was motivated by my grandmother, who is the inspiration behind the channel. Seeing the wealth of knowledge she has inspired me to tell her story and also of other people doing influential work in society.

Another reason is predicated on the need for us as Africans to tell our own stories and own our narratives.”

He said it has been difficult building an audience, growing the channel and making money off it.

“As much as YouTube is a great platform, it has its own challenges. Countless videos are uploaded to the search engine thus making it very competitive.

Scaling it down, issues of quality in production was the main challenge as starting on YouTube was also a start to my filmmaking career.

“Growing the audience on the channel is an enlightening experience. The growth in the channel is based on our belief as a team in trying by all means to be consistent with the content offered to the viewers.

We make money through Google Ads on the videos posted. Offline, we started to sell some branded T-shirts,” said Mr Mahlangu.

Another YouTuber, Mr Langa Ndimande runs a self-named channel and said he started his channel in 2020 at Midlands State University (MSU).

“It was a long dream of mine, plus I was very bored. In my first videos, I was interviewing students at MSU where I was a student. I figured if anyone was going to watch YouTube, it would be varsity students,” said Mr Ndimande.

He said at first engagement was low and that nearly led him to quit.

“People were not watching and I was getting very low engagement, plus the content wasn’t that funny at first. It was only in April of that year when we went on lockdown that I decided to really concentrate on making content.

Also being from Bulawayo, there are not that many content creators, I only knew Bulawayo Memes and Nceku.

So, I felt we were not being represented enough, plus people were always watching South Africa content or American or even Harare guys,” said Mr Ndimande.

He said he changed tactics and started doing interviews around the city and he received a good response.

“So, around June with my friend Mqhele, we went around town asking people how many people they have slept with and that was the video that really got me a bit of attention cause the video got 2 000 views in less than 24 hours.

To me that was wild plus being from Bulawayo it seemed impossible at the time. It was at this moment that I realised that people just want to laugh.

So, I started doing more of these videos on YouTube going around interviewing Bulawayo people asking them different questions,” said Mr Ndimande, whose channel has over 4 000 subscribers.

A YouTube channel called Byo_Tv is also popular and focuses on Zimbabweans, in particular people from Bulawayo, and reminds them of the city.

The channel came about after the Instagram page, Byo memes grew an audience and stands at nearly 120 000 followers.

The channel is run by Mr Mgcini Moyo, who said the first two videos were of him and Nigel Sikhosana his co-host, walking around the city centre.

“These videos were posted about a year ago. Also, the diaspora market we were trying to bring to the YouTube channel was coming from the Byo memes Instagram page.

The logic was that we already have a significant following on Instagram and most people who were engaging at a high level in terms of commenting and continuously asking for more were people from the diaspora, so we said let us create a channel that caters for a market we already have,” said Mr Moyo.

He said after two videos, they then decided to continue entertaining people, however, stopped using nostalgia and instead did sit-down videos.

“Such content allowed us to venture into other topics other than reminding people of their beloved city. After a few sit-down videos, we then started posting Mjolo FM highlights on the YouTube channel.

All this was done so as to grow the YouTube channel by making sure the fan base from Instagram also subscribes to the YouTube Channel,” said Mr Moyo.

Mjolo FM is described as an exhilarating dating game show format on Instagram live as single ladies and gents try to find a love match.

He said they had teething problems when they started.

“When creating content for YouTube, there are resources required. The first one is data.

Depending on the size of the video being posted, generally posting a video on YouTube requires a significant amount of data especially with the podcast at the moment.

Another problem is the camera equipment. One of the reasons why we resorted to posting Mjolo FM highlights was because it was becoming hard to come up with content,” said Mr Moyo.

He said he does not work alone as the channel is a team effort with Qhelani Moyo, Jahalezansi Sibanda, Melisa Jane Hlomani, Mayibongweinkosi Khumalo and Eric Khumalo.

Mr Moyo said the process of growing the channel to over 3 000 subscribers was also a challenge.

“We tried to keep it as organic as it could. We already have a large following on Instagram, but we still had to convince people as to why they should continue to engage without content on YouTube.

That was done through promoting our YouTube content on our Instagram page.

However, in doing so, it was important to make sure the process was organic.

By that I mean we avoided the buying of subscribers or any such unscrupulous tendencies because the engagement on the YouTube Channel is as important as the number of subscribers.

Having subscribers who are highly engaging helps in forming the next idea for content because the comments are where our market communicates with us.”

He said they made money from the channel, but it was a very small amount.

“The channel is monetised and we have started making money through Google AdSense, so if you are watching our content and Advert comes up, you can earn us money by watching the advert,” said Mr Moyo.