Well then, let's take a look at the results of the contest.
I promised to raise and distribute one million rubles (about $10,000) to those with the best YouTube channels focused on their regions, and I’m going to do it.
A total of 518 entrants from 53 regions of our country took part in the contest. Well done, and thank you very much to everyone who participated.
On September 20, we selected the 15 best channels, and the winners were then chosen from among them by a jury consisting of:
[Roberto Panchvidze]({{URL_2}}), founder of the MDK social media community and agency
[Ruslan Shaveddinov]({{URL_3}}), host of the morning political show “Cactus”
[Vasily Yashchuk]({{URL_4}}), video blogging expert, founder of the digital agencies “Players” and “Pixsells”
[Lyubov Sobol]({{URL_5}}), lawyer at the Anti-Corruption Foundation and one of the founders of the Navalny.Live channel
[Alexander Plushev]({{URL_6}}), Russian journalist, blogger, radio host, and TV presenter
The jury scored each participant on a ten-point scale, and the total points determined the winners. We are publishing only the final score, but each jury member will receive the spreadsheet so they can verify that everything was fair.
It is with great pleasure that I present the top 10 winners:
10th place. YaD Channel from Ufa — 29 points
9th place. Abu-Saddam Shishani from Chechnya — 32 points. This participant has been under arrest since mid-July, and we very much hope he will be released soon.
7th–8th place Vladimir Panfilov from the city of Oryol — 35 points
7th–8th place Perm Thunder — 35 points, from Perm, as the name suggests.
5th–6th place New rush word, Saratov — 36 points
5th–6th place Real Journalism Channel, Moscow — 36 points
4th place Especially Dangerous Lawyer from Rostov with 39 points.
And now, the top three winners receiving cash prizes:
3rd place, 42 points, and 200,000 rubles (about $2,000) go to the channel Mari Govori from Nizhny Novgorod — currently with 27,000 subscribers. Subscribe and help that number grow much bigger. On this channel, serious topics are discussed with a heavy dose of irony, and sometimes they even sing.
2nd place, 43 points, and 300,000 rubles (about $3,000) go to Arslan Enn, Chelyabinsk. Literally a week before the contest results were announced, the guy had a sad run of bad luck: his phone, which had the passwords to his accounts, was stolen, and soon after that his channel with 30,000 subscribers was deleted. But Arslan is not giving up and has started a new channel, which already has more than 8,000 subscribers. Subscribe to Arslan.
And our winner — 45 points, and half a million rubles (about $5,000) are going to the city of Saratov. That’s where the channel MezhdoMedia Politics is based. They already have 57,000 subscribers, and they should have many more. They really are excellent. I hope our award and our support will inspire the team and help them become even better.
I’m incredibly happy for the winners and the participants, but I’m even happier for all of us.
Russia’s information space is shrinking so fast that before we know it, there may not be a single even relatively independent media outlet left.
We shouldn’t wait — we should prepare, as some people quite rightly say.
We need to encourage and support the development of political YouTube channels in every possible way, especially regional ones. It doesn’t cost much, but it can be very effective.
Make decent videos and livestreams, and within two months you’ll have a few tens of thousands of subscribers, which means you yourself will be the most influential media outlet in your region. And that’s wonderful.
So I’ll do my best to support those who are working actively and gaining subscribers. And I urge you to take part too — let this be a shared effort. And a shared million rubles (smiley).
Into this Yandex Money wallet — 410014080121888 — I am collecting the money for our winners’ prize fund. Send over your 300–400 rubles (roughly $3–$4). YouTube will beat television, of course, but with our help it will happen faster.