NEW DELHI: Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday interacted with nearly 50 YouTubers who have millions of followers. The meeting focused on consumer awareness and protection with a special focus on fake websites. Those present in the meeting include Vivek Bindra (motivational speaker), Ganesh Prasad (Think School), Gaurav Chaudhary (Technical Guruji), and Prafull Billore (MBA Chai Wala).
“The minister took feedback from the YouTubers on how the government can propagate its schemes through them. Other topics that were discussed included cyber security, ways to boost tourism, popularising handlooms and handicrafts, creating more content on benefits of Shree Anna (millets) among others,” a top government source told this newspaper.
According to the source, YouTubers present in the meeting expressed their keenness to roll out content on their channels that can educate the masses about government programmes and also work as fact checkers, countering misinformation.
“He interacted with the influencers for nearly five hours. He took feedback from the ground to identify the gaps that can be bridged in the government’s overall communication strategy,” the source added. These 50 YouTubers have over 300 million subscribers and 78 million Facebook followers.
They were picked from different genres including finance, economy, technology, food and lifestyle, motivational speakers, politics, comedy, art, podcasters and current affairs, etc. Notably, meeting with the YouTubers comes at a crucial time, when political parties are gearing up for big elections in 2024. Many politicians are pitching YouTubers to reach people. Recently, foreign ministers S Jaishankar and Piyush Goyal gave their interviews to Ranveer Allahbadia, who has more than 5.5 million subscribers on YouTube.