The number of content creators earning more than Sh1 million monthly on YouTube is up by 60 per cent, over the past year.
Kenyan YouTube content creators are leading in Africa with 400 channels having 100,000 subscribers each.
Nigeria and South Africa have 300 channels each boasting 100,000 subscribers each.
This is far behind Kenya’s drive, which continues to attract a wide variety of content from cooking, classroom lessons, music, sports and travel.
While releasing the statistics, YouTube Africa managing director Alex Okosi said Kenya’s content creation growth rose at the highest pace, 70 per cent.
He said several initiatives had been launched to help creators in Kenya improve the quality of content uploaded on YouTube, enhancing the creators' reach and earning potential.
“Citizen TV, Churchill TV, KTN News, NTV Kenya, K24 TV and RnB singer-songwriter Otile Brown have more than one million subscribers each, with two channels having reached more than a billion views,” Okosi said.
However, a paltry 45 per cent of Kenyan content is being consumed by a global audience.
Nigeria has up to 75 per cent of its content being consumed by a global audience while South Africa’s content attracts 65 per cent of viewers from across the world.
“Africa has an amazing culture and good storytellers who use YouTube to showcase the diversity," Okosi said.
"We are committed to enabling these creators to voice their stories and provide access to the rest of the world using YouTube, which in the long run, leads us too to success."
More than 70 per cent of watch time happens on mobile devices.
YouTube watch time on mobile app devices averages more than 60 minutes daily.
Its watch time on TV screens alone is more than 250 million hours daily.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, has launched a global campaign to grow its advertising revenues earned from the video live-streaming platform, YouTube.
In the latest foray into the African market, YouTube hosted content creators, corporates and marketing executives at an event dubbed YouTube festival last week.
This was the first YouTube festival in Kenya.
According to US securities regulators' data, YouTube made Sh3.476 trillion in 2021.
This was a 46 per cent increase compared to its 2020 earnings of Sh2.377 trillion.
YouTube's revenue peaked in the fourth quarter of 2021 at Sh1.042 trillion in earnings.
In 2022 Q1, the earnings dampened to Sh829 billion before settling at Sh885.9 billion in Q2.
(Edited by Bilha Makokha)