Meet the 'second Chungju Man': Inside the Ministry of SMEs and Startups' 100,000-subscriber YouTube channel

Stepping through the door of Room 410 on the fourth floor of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups at Government Complex Sejong on Thursday, visitors encounter something unexpected in the middle of an otherwise ordinary office corridor: a pojangmacha — a Korean street-food stall — has materialized inside a government ministry. The sign above it reads "Moni Pocha," a name that captures the show's mission of introducing small and medium-sized enterprise and small-business policies in a relaxed, money-savvy way. It is the ministry's YouTube filming studio.

The room doubles as the spokesperson's office conference room and a staff lounge when cameras are not rolling, transforming into a "surprise pojangmacha" where policy officials and business owners sit down for a chat once filming begins. Rather than building a dedicated large-scale studio, the ministry repurposed an existing space — a practical, cost-conscious approach that reflects the civil service's instinct for efficiency.

The studio is where the ministry films its YouTube series "Moni Pocha," and the host is no professional broadcaster. Yu In-seok, 45, a senior civil servant handling digital communications for the ministry's spokesperson's office, sits in front of the camera himself. Yu oversees virtually every aspect of production — channel management, content planning, scripting and hosting. "Moni Pocha" is a show he conceived and builds together with his colleagues.

"Government policy communications can easily come across as stiff, so we designed the concept around a pojangmacha — a familiar, down-to-earth space — where people can talk comfortably," Yu said. "We have the policy officials and companies appear directly on the show to introduce the relevant policies themselves."

The road to that format involved some trial and error. When the show began with two civil servants facing each other and exchanging policy questions and answers, viewers found it little more than a policy briefing. "At first it was just the policy official and me going back and forth with questions and answers, but talking only about policy made it hard to absorb," Yu said. "Later, we switched to inviting companies that had actually used the policies, letting them tell their story first — how they grew, what setbacks they faced — and then introducing the policies that helped them along the way. That's when the popularity picked up."

Yu is in his 17th year as a civil servant and his seventh in the spokesperson's office. Asked why he stepped in front of the camera rather than simply planning the content, he said: "We needed a new face."

"I thought it would be good if someone appeared on camera to connect with the public in a fresh way, and I ended up casting myself — the person who had planned the whole thing," he said with a laugh. "I appear on the show with the mindset of being the ministry's first influencer."

The response inside the ministry has shifted as well. Staff at a government agency do not automatically watch their own official SNS content, but as more videos featuring colleagues planning and appearing on screen began to roll out, employees started paying attention to both the content and the policies it covers.

"As staff appeared on camera and we made more entertaining content, interest grew internally too, and it has been helping us get the word out about our policies," Yu said.

The ministry's push into YouTube content reflects a broader shift in how the government communicates. Where policy promotion once revolved around press releases and briefings, a growing share of public outreach now flows through YouTube, Instagram, X and other SNS platforms.

The Chungju city government's YouTube channel "Chung TV," built around the personal character of a local civil servant, stands as the defining success story in this space. Since the emergence of Kim Seon-tae — widely known as the "Chungju Man" — competition among central ministries and local governments to deliver policy in an entertaining way has intensified.

Communication capacity is also carrying more weight in government performance evaluations. Central ministries are assessed annually on policy communications as part of the government performance review. YouTube alone does not determine the outcome, but audience response to a ministry's flagship channel and how well it is run factor into the scores.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups won the top prize in the government ministry category at last year's Korea SNS Awards, and last month its subscriber count crossed 100,000. More recently, the ministry produced a series of "K-Classic Music Videos" reimagining traditional Korean folk tales as startup stories — the five episodes together have racked up around 2 million views. The premise of familiar folk-tale characters, such as the heroine of "Kongjwi and Patjwi," venturing into entrepreneurship proved a hit with audiences.

Yu's goal is to make the Ministry of SMEs and Startups' YouTube channel the most influential among all cabinet-level ministries. The channel currently sits in the upper-middle tier by subscriber count among the 19 cabinet-level ministries, but his plan is to build it into a top-ranked channel by a broader measure — one that counts not just subscribers but also views, comments and shares. "My goal isn't simply to lead on subscriber numbers, but to build the top channel among central ministries when you factor in engagement and audience response as well," he said.