Have you ever seen websites that provide the ranking lists for the most popular Lao Youtube channels? Here's an explanation of why you need to be weary of those numbers.
There are channels out there that identify their location as Laos. Certainly, those ones can be easily accounted for. However, there are many who do not use Laos as their location even though they are clearly fully Lao nationals, living in Laos themselves.
Why is this the case? Mainly because previously the country was not a part of the Youtube Partner Program. In other words, you could not monetize your channel if you stated your location was Laos.
Laos was only added to the Youtube Partner Program in December 2022.
So what many Lao Youtubers would do was that they would select Thailand, US, or other countries where there was Youtube monetization and where they had access to a bank account of that country in order to receive funds.
By way of example, a popular Lao Youtube channel is Una Studio with 1.33M subscribers as the date of this post (December 21, 2022). They are from Savannakhet, Laos and only speak Lao in their videos. However, when you look at the Youtube profile location they indicate Thailand.
This is why tracking the most popular Lao Youtubers can be a bit of a challenge, especially if researchers are using only country location as their criteria.
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