Everline Mungai Wanjiku who is popularly known as Mungai Eve is a millionaire. She has made millions from creating content on her YouTube channel, which currently has over 700,000 subscribers.
Every month, Mungai Eve makes over Sh. 1.5 million from her channel. At the time her channel had a subscription of 204,000, the lowest she was making was Sh. 700,000 on bad months.
The channel, she says, was the brainchild of her boyfriend who is also her director. Eve wanted to move back to the village but Trevor sold her the YouTube idea.
“You shouldn’t go. I have an idea, let’s first try it out. Let’s start the Mungai Eve YouTube channel then see how it goes,” he told me. However, before they started the channel, the couple started by managing peoples’ Instagram pages at Sh. 1,000.
At the time they were creating the channel in September 2020, Eve was not familiar with the social media ecosystem but was ready to learn how to become a YouTuber.
“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 got a lot of attention with over 1,000 subscribers,” she told a local publication.
“Our second video was about the ‘sheng masters’ Mbogi Genje, who was trending then. We did a voice pop about their music. Then someone introduced us to one of their rivals, Madocho of Gotta City camp, whom we also covered. When we uploaded those two videos, that was it, the Mungai Eve channel just blew off. The numbers of subscribers and view time increased significantly, that was our breakthrough.”
It was then that Eve and Trevor decided to monetize their channel.
“There are a set of rules for one to qualify to monetize an account. You have to ensure you don’t have copyright claims on whatever you upload. You must also post original content and, most importantly, achieve 4,000 watch hours on your entire YouTube channel,” he told the publication.
The first-ever cheque they got from the video platform was worth Sh. 100,000 but took time to access the money due to security protocols. The more views you get the more the revenue increases.
“What I get this month may not be the same amount next month,” she said. The two had already started monetizing their content within a week of creating it.
“The reason we make money from YouTube is that our previous videos are still being watched,” her director Trevor added.
For instance, in the first 12 days of July 2021, her YouTube earnings had passed and her YouTube earnings were already standing at $2,103 (Sh. 225,000). “YouTube pays daily then remits the net sum to your bank account every 20th of the month,” she said.
Eve says that she has been getting beautiful offers to sell her channel.
“People love to jump on already moving wagons. I have received several offers from several companies to buy my channel. One tabled a tempting offer of Sh. 10 million but we declined,” she said.