Transparency Tube: Visualising the Political Divide on YouTube

The recently launched transparency.tube project offers a new ‘Window into Culture and Politics on YouTube’. It displays thousands of the largest English-speaking channels actively engaged in discussions of political and cultural topics as bubbles, and lets users cluster these channels to clearly visualize their size and influence.

 Each channel is classified according to its content and tagged. This allows users to sort them according to criteria they are most interested in.

From the outset, there are interesting observations to be made. Sorting by political leanings, over the last year to date, the left-wing comes first in terms of video view counts, at 23 billion. Channels in the political center reached 20 billion views, while the right came last, standing at 19 billion. According to this metric, the left-wing has been 21% larger than the right.

However, if we sort by hours watched, the view changes dramatically. The right-wing comes first at 1.7 billion hours, leaving both the left-wing and the center behind at 1.5 billion hours. This means that viewers of right-wing channels spend on average 36% more time watching, with an average viewing time of 5 minutes 20 seconds, compared to the left-wing’s time of just under 4 minutes.

One major, clearly visible difference between the left-wing and right-wing ‘communities’ is centralization. The political left on YoutTube is much more concentrated in, and dominated by, institutional channels, often part of the US corporate press. On the other hand, the right-wing is much more fragmented into smaller, independent creators - with a major caveat of Fox, which oversees the three largest channels.

Beyond just the left-right spectrum, transparency.tube allows sorting by other affiliations. For example, on the Social Justice / Anti-Woke divide, we can see the latter dominating the former, with more than double of hours watched over the last year. An interesting feature here is that the Anti-Woke side is composed of a mix of channels characterized both as right-wing and center, (with the centrist Joe Rogan dominating the cluster with the two largest channels) while the Social Justice side remains almost exclusively left-wing.

Out of the tags listed on the side, ‘Mainstream News’ is by far the largest in terms of hours watched over the last year (2bn), while ‘White Identitarian’ comes last and more than 25000% smaller, with only 7.8 million hours watched. 

On transparency.tube, you can also see the most viewed videos from a selected period. With the US presidential election around the corner, 9 out of the 10 most viewed pieces over the last week are videos and campaign ads put out by the Trump team. The remaining one is the Joe Rogan Experience interview with Kanye West (who, beyond his celebrity career, is also a presidential candidate).

‘Mainstream News’ channels have been steadily growing over the last year on YouTube, from hours watched ranging between 90 and 120 million per month at the end of last year, to the last several months reaching between 140 and 180 million per month. There are two clear spikes in this data over the last year. The first one shows more than 200 million hours watched per month during March and April, as the COVID crisis coverage reached its peak. The other is happening right now, as the ‘Mainstream News’ hours watched in October have already topped the March record by the 27th, and is projected to reach 235 million by the end of month. Although these spikes can be attributed to the COVID crisis and the upcoming US election respectively, the steady growth of the MSM could reflect the shift at YouTube over the recent years in political and cultural circles, from the focus on being a platform for independent content-creators to becoming more of a news aggregator for the corporate press.