Written by: Saman Khalid
Posted on: December 12, 2023 | 
| 中文
Popular Pakistani YouTubers
If you were tasked with doing nothing but watching YouTube for the rest of your life, you would only be able to consume 0.00…1 percent of the content available on the platform. That may sound like an overstatement, but in actuality, 500 hours of footage is uploaded to YouTube every single minute. It translates to almost 82 years of videos uploaded in one hour alone. These staggering statistics easily prove that YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world, just after Google. It goes without saying that there is no dearth of variety and diversity on YouTube, with videos pouring in from across the globe. However, what is Pakistan’s role in the YouTube industry? This question can be answered by analyzing the local YouTube giants.
Arslan Naseer is famous for his humorous content
Currently, there are over 5400 YouTube channels with more than 100,000 subscribers in Pakistan. Out of these, almost 350 channels have crossed a million subscribers. There are two distinct categories of popular channels: commercial companies and individual creators.
The following is a list of mainstream channels run by companies and businesses.
ARY DIGITAL: 49.5 million subscribers- TV Drama
HAR PAL GEO: 48.5 M subscribers- TV Drama
HUM TV: 32.5M subscribers – TV Drama
Coke Studio Pakistan: 14.7M subscribers- Music
GEO NEWS: 14.5M subscribers- NEWS
ARY NEWS: 12.6M subscribers – NEWS
SAMAA TV: 9.66M subscribers- NEWS
Apart from them, other channels like Dunya News, ISPR Official, BOL Network and APLUS Entertainment have also exhibited exponential growth over the past few years.
Urdu Point
Salman Noman
Ducky Bhai, Maaz Safdar World, Shahveer Jaffry, Maryam Pervaiz, Sistrology etc. are among the channels which receive the highest engagement on their videos. Most of the chart-topping channels are practically dead, with no more than a few thousand views on each video. Why is this so? The answer might lie in the nature and quality of the content being produced by these channels.
Ducky Bhai and Areeba Jatoi
Drawing from the stats, it is obvious that certain niches dominate the YouTube screens of the Pakistani populace. Vlogging seems to be ruling the day, followed closely by news, television shows and cooking. The reason as to why television companies are luring in millions of followers is the fact that people treat YouTube as a replacement for conventional television. As a consequence, they have simply switched over to their smartphones for the consumption of content they previously watched on television. However, the engagement raked in by successful autonomous channels can serve as a sound parameter to gauge the audience's interests. As it appears, vlogging channels perform best in terms of rankings and views, no matter how mundane the actual quality of the videos might be. This points to the viewer's heightened curiosity when it comes to the creators' personal lives. Influencers have put their finger on this pressure point and their content reflects that. Most of their videos, center around a specific event in their lives that they are unnaturally eager to share with their "fans".
TBH (To Be Honest) featuring Raza Samo and Tabish Hashmi
The answer is a clear NO! Anyone who is chronically online can attest to the fact that there is absolutely no standard that Pakistani content can be held to. The most followed channel of the country is nothing more than a giant compilation of the creator's various TikTok videos. The so-called vlogging channels seem to be capitalizing on their families and exploiting them for views. Not even children are spared in this superficial rat race of likes and shares. Vloggers can apparently upload anything and everything on their channels, ranging from what they had for breakfast to the complete documentation of their wedding festivities. Whether or not the content adds any value to the viewer's life isn't on their list of concerns. This mind-numbing overexposure of influencers has led to the normalization of publicizing every facet of one's day-to-day life. What makes people click on such videos is a mystery that is quite hard to crack. After all, one definitely wonders how any semblance of entertainment could be found in someone going about their daily chores and blabbering continuously.
Junaid Akram
Unfortunately, witnessing the unwarranted success of massy vlog channels has incentivized a lot of newbies to start similar channels. While most of them stay under the radar, some manage to make it big. Analyzing the trends reveals that quality channels with substantial content barely get any traction. However, not everything can be pinned on the audience. There is a meagre supply of premium content, as creators often hold back from experimenting. That being said, there are still some active influencers out there who take accountability for their content. Junaid Akram, TBT, Arsalan Naseer and Awesome Speaks, are a few channels that boast thoughtful commentary on a multitude of topics. They may not be the most popular, but their viewers form a civilized and cultured fanbase. On the whole, it can be hoped that the YouTube industry of Pakistan might experience a wave of transformation as GenZ realize the significance of sustainability and quality.
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