The YouTube prayer channel started during Covid that’s causing a stir.
YouTube has been a hub for religious content since its inception.
On March 13, 2020, as the outbreak of the novel coronavirus spread across the world’s most populous countries and cities, a few YouTube channels were the first to jump onto the digital prayer bandwagon.
YouTube creators had a quick response to this alarming development, and with the help of the platform’s algorithm, a few videos had millions of views in the span of a few hours.
YouTube prayer, however, has its limitations, as the video creators usually end it with what seems like a call to prayer.
But many of the videos on the channel called “YouTube Prayer” are, in fact, genuine expressions of prayer.
The channel’s first video, a video titled “YouTube Prayer” by Yashar Raj, was uploaded at 8 p.m. on March 13, 2020. Three hours and a few minutes after, it had received 4,200,000 views and over 7,200 comments.
The subsequent five videos on the channel were in the news when the New York Times published a piece about the channel in its podcast What We PRAYed: The Coronavirus Crisis on March 15, 2020. The author, Yashar Raj, wrote a video titled “The 10 Best and 10 Worst Christian YouTube Channels.”
Yashar Raj has been featured in the media before. In January 2014, he was featured in a Huffington Post article about his “YouTube Prayer” video titled “The Bible Comes to YouTube” which had received almost 8,000,000 views at the time.
Yeshiva World, an Israeli-American Jewish nonprofit, founded in 2012 as a global outreach initiative, began hosting religious content on YouTube in February 2016.
On YouTube, Jewish videos