“I will need a hundred rats for tomorrow, is that possible?” », Sopheak asks a vendor at Moung Ruessei Market, who nods in her counterfeit Chanel hat as she writes down the order. “The dishes with the rats are always a hit on my YouTube channel”, launches the young Cambodian of 35 years to explain his choice. No time to waste, he must now pick up 132 kg of chicken from another saleswoman to whom he placed an order the day before. In front of the gutted poultry stand, Sopheak looks back on his journey. He is waiting for his sister Sina and his brother-in-law Mok, who participate in all the videos of Kitchen Foods, his YouTube channel.
“In 2018, I was employed in a mobile phone store in Phnom Penh, and I was looking for a way to make more money. I typed on Google “how to make money”, I found a training course which I followed. That’s how I started creating YouTube channels about my passions: boxing and movies., he says. But the success is not there and Sopheak’s accounts are closed by the platform because he did not respect the copyrights of the extracts of the videos he used in his productions. “I was a little disappointed but I didn’t give up, he resumes. And then I had the idea of making videos about the kitchen in the village where my sister and her husband live. This is how I started Kitchen Foods. »
The success of Asian rural cuisine
He is not the only one to have had this idea. Since 2017, YouTube channels of rural cuisine from developing countries in Asia have started to emerge. From Bangladesh to India, via Cambodia, all have in common to entertain their subscribers by cooking and devouring large quantities of local specialties, before redistributing the leftovers to the poorest. And the sauce seems to take: the Bangladeshi channel Grandpa Kitchen thus totals 9.5 million subscribers and nearly a billion views, when its Indian competitor Village Cooking Channelshe is close to twenty million subscribers and has accumulated more than five billion views.
Certainly, with its two hundred million views and some 570,000 subscribers, Kitchen Foods is not yet at that level. But the Cambodian channel still earns Sopheak around the equivalent of “10,000 euros per month, 15,000 the good months”. A real fortune in a country where the average monthly salary is around 250 euros.
The recipe for this success, Sopheak explains it in his own way: “On YouTube, people like to watch the impossible. They are not used to seeing peasants swallowing huge quantities of food. It seems unreal to them! There is also the type of food we cook. By watching our videos, city dwellers realize that in exchange for more comfort, they have made their existence boring. »
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