Subur Imam Hidayat was trapped. It was early 2017, and he had spent almost 13 years working as a clothing store attendant in Bondowoso, on the Indonesian island of Java—in debt to the store’s owner and earning just £110 ($132) a month. On that salary, it would have taken him 10 years to repay his creditor. So, like many cash-strapped people all over the world, he turned to Google looking for answers.
Four options coalesced from the mess of search results: blogger, web developer, drop shipper, or YouTuber. The first three weren’t really feasible. The 31-year-old hadn’t had much exposure to digital life; he’d never even owned a computer. But he did have a smartphone. “It doesn’t need a lot of stuff to start your own video,” says Hidayat. “You just need a cellphone.”
In early 2017, with his battered Xiaomi Note 5 phone, Hidayat started reading tutorials and watching videos, trying to teach himself how to become a successful YouTuber. “The first six months were all failures,” Hidayat says. “I hadn’t found the perfect formula and I was not consistent enough in producing videos.”
Hidayat focused his channel on tutorial videos about herbal remedies and Muslim prayers. He produced them in the evenings after work with, as he puts it, “no special treatment nor special equipment or settings.” But these simple videos had a huge impact.
By late 2017, he started to make money from his videos, which he posts under the name Imam Januar. His first paycheck was 40 million IDR (£2,200 or $2,570), which was a significant amount in his hometown, where the minimum wage is just £82 ($99) a month. “It’s all about finding your own style, consistency, and knowing what the audiences need the most. And you don’t need that expensive gear,” he says—in fact, he once used a cut-out water bottle as a tripod.
Before long, Hidayat was able to settle his debt with the money he earned from YouTube, eventually leaving his full-time job in 2019 to become a YouTuber, creating more channels and producing hundreds of videos per month.
His success, however, bred suspicion around his small hamlet in Tapen village. Villagers accused him of practicing black magic to earn a quick buck. Then, something amazing started to happen. Hidayat began teaching his neighbors the art of content creation and YouTube monetization. His village has now become the unlikely heart of Indonesia’s growing YouTube community.
Hidayat transformed his garage into a workshop, where people from across the archipelago come to learn from the YouTube master. “My home has become like the headquarters of YouTubers,” Hidayat says. “Young and old people came to learn from each other and to collaborate. It’s open 24/7, basically like a place to hang out.”
Dozens of silver and gold YouTube Play buttons hang on the wall, a testament to his achievement in amassing millions of subscribers. There are four computers with high-speed internet service that can be used by villagers to upload their videos, after Hidayat realized many of them found it difficult to upload from their smartphones with their limited data allowances.
Hidayat has become a role model that other villagers have followed—there are around 150 in his hamlet alone, he estimates. Take Angga Pradipta Heriyansyah, for instance, a 30-year-old man better known as Alex. Heriyansyah worked as a factory worker for eight years in Bondowoso and another year as a food peddler on the holiday island Bali before returning to his hometown in 2020.
Inspired by Hidayat and working with other young people in the village, Heriyansyah founded RB Official, which is now one of the most popular channels in East Java, if not Indonesia, with more than 800,000 subscribers. The channel specializes in short soap operas—rich and poor students at a fictional high school, a love story between a blind man and a civil servant—and ghost pranks, and quickly gained a diehard fan base, with each video gaining at least 30,000 views within its first week.
“We don’t use scripts,” says Heriyansyah, who acts as creative director. “We just improvise. One of the tricks is to quickly materialize what’s trending nowadays, especially within the socioeconomic realm. Because inspirational, daily stories are always close to the heart of the people.” Another trick: Always use a good thumbnail.
Heriyansyah is one of many success stories from Bondowoso and more generally Indonesia, which has 127 million active YouTube users—more than any country in the world, according to Global Media Insight. He used his earnings to build a house for his parents, and to buy a car and a motorbike.
As more people from Bondowoso became successful on YouTube, national media began to highlight the phenomenon. Recently, regional governments have started inviting Hidayat to give lectures on digital content to their residents. He’s happy to share his secrets to anyone who asks, and wants to “empower the youth in Bondowoso.”
“For a long time, the young people have had to make money elsewhere, away from the family and not making enough. I want to give them a chance to earn a living to help their families in their hometown with just simple equipment.”
This article was first published in the September/October 2022 issue of WIRED UK magazine.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
