President López Obrador could earn millions if he chose to monetize his personal YouTube channel, according to social media analytics websites.
AMLO, as the president is best known, has 2.39 million subscribers to his YouTube channel on which his morning press conferences are broadcast every weekday. He also uses the video-sharing platform to disseminate his frequent messages to citizens as well as transmit footage of the many events he attends.
According to the newspaper Milenio, only United States President Donald Trump has more YouTube subscribers than López Obrador among world leaders.
The social media analytics websites Social Blade and Noxinfluencer both place AMLO’s channel among the 250 most watched in Mexico. They say that the president could earn up to US $139,400 a month if he monetized the channel, meaning that annual revenue would be just shy of $1.7 million.
However, AMLO doesn’t appear likely to line his pockets with YouTube ad revenue any time soon as the president’s office told Milenio that he has no current plan to cash in on his popular channel.
For now, López Obrador seems happy enough to watch his subscription numbers and video views, rather than his bank account figures, click up at an impressive pace.
Many of the videos on his channel have been watched millions of times. Among them: an interview he did with the Bloomberg news agency in 2019 (6 million views); a message from August 2020 entitled “The neoliberal period in Mexico was a synonym of corruption” (4.7 million views); and a message from June 2019 in which he celebrates reaching 1 million subscribers (2.6 million views).
In addition to those impressive figures, AMLO has more than 7.2 million Facebook fans, 7.7 million Twitter followers and 846,000 Instagram followers to whom he can directly convey messages and thus bypass the traditional media channels he frequently berates.
With that kind of following, and the influence it affords him, it’s no wonder that the president has described the online platforms as benditas redes sociales – blessed, or holy, social networks.
Source: Milenio (sp)
