Creating a YouTube channel might seem very easy and even posting videos on it might not be all that difficult, but to go beyond that and actually make the channel successful is no mean feat.
Only a few handful of people are able to achieve real success from their YouTube channel and even fewer are able to make any real money out of it. Even in that, you’d probably have some preconceived notions on what kind of people are able to do this, usually, someone who is from urban areas, is adept with digital media, and so on.
Which is why the fact that a cooking YouTube channel made by a group of villagers from a small village in Tamil Nadu making history in this space is worthy of notice.
The Village Cooking Channel (VCC) has cemented its name in the records as the first Tamil YouTube channel to get over 1 crore (10 million) subscribers.
What Is This Channel?
The YouTube channel called Village Cooking Channel (VCC) was created by 75-year-old Periyathambi and his five grandchildren V Subramanian, V Murugesan, V Ayyanar, G Tamilselvan and T Muthumanickam who come from a small village called Chinna Veeramangalam in Tamil Nadu’s Pudukkottai district.
Started in April 2018 the videos are mostly the group of five or six members cooking various types of dishes in the agricultural fields of their village mostly using traditional methods.
In their Diamond Play button unboxing video, the Subramanian also revealed that “We have agriculture work for six months and the rest of the time we do not have much to do. That is when we decided to start the channel.”
The channel is made videos on a variety of different dishes both vegetarian and non-vegetarian like lobster fry, quail biryani, south Indian snack Achu murukku, mutton keema, exotic winged termites and much more.
All the food that is prepared during these videos is afterward distributed to nearby orphanages and needy people.
Periyathambi is actually a pretty experienced cook with almost 50 years of experience in the catering field that he joined when he was around 25 years old.
As per reports, he has said that “This is possible only due to the effort of my grandchildren. One day they told me we can start a YouTube channel and I asked them what YouTube is. They then explained to me the process and showed me videos of other cooking channels and I agreed to do it. My friends, relatives who have seen me in this village since an early age are very happy seeing this.”
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All the grandchildren are also very well-educated with Subramanian, the video editor and cameraman has an M Phil in commerce, Tamilselvan has an M Phil in nanotechnology while Muthumancikam is a student of hotel management and Ayyanar has a B Com degree.
All this education did work in favour of the channel, since it allowed the creators to understand their audience and create content in a manner that got them more views.
Murugesan told The Indian Express that “I was running a website, I sold it and then invested the money in starting a channel on YouTube. In the first eight months, we lost around 1.5 lakhs. Our channel didn’t have a good reach because we did what other channels were doing. So, we decided to change our pattern and thought of cooking dishes with items that are all available in our nearby ponds and lakes. We decided that our videos should be raw without any artificiality. Around February 2019, we received Rs 37,000 from YouTube, which was our first income from that channel. Then we understood this is our route.”
There were some road bumps for the channel, especially in wake of the COVID-19 pandemic that restricted their channel activity. Subramanian said that “Before COVID, we used to upload our videos once every three days. Due to the lockdown, we are now able to put videos only once a week. Also, we used to distribute our food to nearby villages. Now with current restrictions, we are not able to do that.”
One of their biggest rise to fame was also their meeting with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi who visited the group while campaigning for the recent election.
Periyathambi while speaking about the meeting said “I never believed when my boys said that Rahul Gandhi was coming to visit us. But it happened. He reached our place, spoke and shook hands with us and even cooked. We were told that he would be here for around 20-30 minutes only but he was there with us for more than an hour. He said he would visit us again. We are waiting for that day.”
They even posted a video featuring Gandhi cooking mushroom biryani with them in January this year.
This actually gave a big boost to the channel where after Rahul Gandhi’s visit the channel saw nearly 30,000 to 40,000 subscribers per week. This was a big increase from their earlier number of just around 10,000 subscribers a week.
This is not all, the channel creators are choosing to give back to the community too, with a donation of Rs. 10 lakh being made after the achievement to the Tamil Nadu chief minister COVID-19 relief fund. This money came from their earnings through their YouTube channel itself.
Image Credits: Google Images
Sources: Moneycontrol, The Indian Express, The Hindu
Find the blogger: @chirali_08
This post is tagged under: chennai, tamil nadu, Village Cooking Channel, Village Cooking Channel youtube, Village Cooking Channel Tamil Nadu subscribers, YouTube subscribers, Tamil Nadu chief minister Covid-19 relief fund, Tamil YouTube channel, Chinna Veeramangalam, V Subramanian, V Murugesan, V Ayyanar, G Tamilselvan, T Muthumanickam, M Periyathambi,
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