Rural YouTubers, Hyperlocal Narratives, and Digital Production Cultures in Small-Town India

This article examines the rise of platformized collective creator cultures in rural India. Focusing on a rural YouTube collective in Telangana, South India, it explores how rural creators in non-urban contexts navigate and sustain their work within the global social media entertainment and creator culture ecology. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews, the study demonstrates how rural creators produce aspirational digital content through innovative storytelling practices that blend entertainment with social awareness, using cinematic production logics such as spectacular visuals, drone cinematography, and creative editing. Sustained through collective media labor, their professionalized, platformed cultural productions have not only established them as popular creators but also generated persistent economic and creative tensions. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on regional social media entertainment and creator cultures, particularly from non-urban and rural perspectives.