Effectiveness of Virtual Agricultural Channels Broadcasted Through YouTube as Perceived by the Farmers

Abstract

YouTube is one of the most popular social media platforms. Now a days around more than fifty percent of the farmers are using this YouTube is useful to know about general news, enjoy music or how-to-video of Agricultural Videos. This study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of virtual agricultural channels broadcasted through YouTube as perceived by the farmers at Dumuria upazila under Khulna district of Bangladesh. The data were collected from a sample of eighty respondents selected through snowball sampling technique, by means of personal interviewduring25 August 2022 and 27 February 2023 using interview schedule. Ten popular YouTube channels were selected to study the effectiveness of virtual agricultural channels broadcasted through YouTube. The data were analyzed with descriptive statistics viz frequency distribution and percentage. The relationships between the independent and dependent variables were determined by using Spearman's ranked correlation coefficient. Most of the respondents’ (86.25%) perceived that the virtual agricultural channels broadcasted through YouTube were less effective from overall. consideration. Considering individual channels, Shykh Seraj and Math Krishi were highly effective while Agamir Krishi and Krishi Bioscope were less effective from farmers’ perception point of view. Among the 13 characteristics, education, extension media contact, knowledge of virtual agricultural channels broadcasted through YouTube, contact with other virtual media and extent of exposure to virtual agricultural channels broadcasted through YouTube had shown a positive significant relationship and age, family size, farming experience had shown a negative significant relationship with their extent of effectiveness of virtual agricultural channel broadcasted through YouTube. The most common problem that limits the effectiveness was "required materials are expensive and not easily assessable" (77.5%) while the least common problem was "all information is not correct" (52.5%).