T.N. GIM 2024 | Village Cooking Channel creators share story of going from personal failure to wildly popular YouTube channel

Village Cooking Channel founders share their experiences at Tamil Nadu GIM 2024, discussing the potential of creative economy & their journey to success with 23.4 million subscribers.

Creators of the hugely popular ‘Village Cooking Channel’, which has 23.4 million subscribes on YouTube, on Monday, January 8, 2024, shared their experiences at a panel discussion, at the Tamil Nadu Global Investors Meet (GIM) 2024 in Chennai.

At the discussion moderated by Aathitiyan V.S., founder and CEO, Cookd and his colleague Sanjna Sridhar on the topic, ‘Harnessing the potential of creative economy’, V. Ayyanar, one of the three important members of the channel said they all got together to begin the channel after all of their individual businesses had failed. His brothers, V. Murugesan, V. Subramanian; cousins, G. Tamilselvan and Muthumanickam along with their grandfather, M. Periyathambi, hailing from Pudukottai district, participated in the session.

Village Cooking Channel showcases the cooking of various dishes, set in the lush green outdoors of villages.

“Our grandfather was running a catering business and cooking for marriages and so on. All of our businesses had failed, and in our village, when this happens, we would have to go to the Gulf to make a living. We were planning to go abroad for work, and that’s when our older brother came up with the idea of doing something on the internet. That’s how we started the YouTube channel about cooking in 2018,” said Mr. Ayyanar.

While being popular among Tamil audiences worldwide, the Village Cooking Channel came to India-wide attention after Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was featured in a cooking video, where he was seen loudly announcing the names of the ingredients in Tamil, a distinct style used in the channel’s videos.

Asked why people love their videos, Mr. Muthumanickam said Tamils living abroad and in major cities, miss their villages and green surroundings and they love watching food being cooked in such a surrounding. Mr. Periyathambi said they decide on what to cook and shoot collectively.

Mr. Subramanian said they think and discuss extensively, about why the audience must watch their videos. “We analyse this aspect deeply. Audiences have newspaper, Instagram reels, radios, the option of going out...leaving all of this, why must they spend 10 minutes [on our videos]. Audiences have many other modes of entertainment,” he said.