Mungai Eve is arguably one of Kenya’s most influential content creators thanks to her exclusive and informative interviews on her YouTube channel.
A sneak peek on her YouTube channel showed that the 22-year-old commands over 640,000 subscribers with a total of 120.6 million views.
Mungai started her YouTube channel with the help of her boyfriend, Director Trevor, who doubles up as her videographer.
In an interview with Nation, the content creator explained that she started shooting YouTube content after dropping out of college due to lack of fees.
“I was preparing to go back for my second semester when the coronavirus pandemic struck
”Things really got bad financially for my father and, being a private student, he asked me to stay at home as he looked for funds to send me back to school,” she said.
Mungai mentioned that instead of sitting at home, she decided to move to Nairobi where she’d engage in odd jobs to make ends meet.
“I was crashing at a friend’s place and getting these odd jobs wasn’t that easy either. Sometimes I would get a job that paid Ksh 200 a day and when I factor my expenses for the day, I end up using all of it,” she recalled.
It was during this period when she was informed of the idea of starting a YouTube channel as she was planning to go back to the village.
“I called my boyfriend and informed him of my decision. He listened and said, ‘You shouldn’t go. I have an idea, let’s first try it out. Let’s start Mungai Eve YouTube channel then see how it goes’,” Mungai said.
Their breakthrough came when they covered an apparent chaos at a local event; which had a lot of engagements and in turn attracted over 1,000 new subscribers.
“Trevor attended the Gengetone festival and there was a skirmish leading to the death of one person. He recorded the incident and asked me to do a voiceover narrating what had transpired
”That was our first video upload on the channel and it really got a lot of attention,” Mungai said.
Their first huge pay from YouTube was Ksh 100,000 that came just a month after they started the channel.
As of August 2021, Mungai noted that the channel generates at least Ksh 700,000 on a bad month and up to Ksh 1.5 million on a good month.
“You have to have a signature to the kind of content you intend to put out. We focus more on telling stories about the lives of the youth in the ghettos
“I also cover events and celebrities who appeal to my audience and in maintaining that, I have been able to continue creating attention towards my channel despite having uploaded very few videos,” she mentioned.