Examining popular YouTube news channels: News on YouTube comes from a mix of news organizations and independent channelsĪbout half (49%) of the 377 most popular YouTube news channels are affiliated with a news organization. The rest of this chapter explains these and other patterns in more detail. In addition, in December 2019, independent channels were collectively more likely than channels associated with news organizations to mention or focus on conspiracy theories and to take a negative tone toward the main subjects of their videos. For instance, independent channels are more likely to be centered around a specific personality – often someone who had no public profile before gaining attention on YouTube – and more likely to seek donations directly from viewers. The two analyses find that YouTube’s platform is a diverse news environment that provides space for independent news creators to thrive alongside more traditional news organizations, and that the content on these different types of channels varies in important ways. Nearly 3,000 videos (2,967) published by these channels in December 2019 were examined by the coders for the topics and tone contained within them, among other attributes. To narrow the list of channels to a manageable number for the small group of human coders who watched the videos and categorized them, the analysis includes only the 100 channels with the highest views on their median video published in December 2019. The second part of the analysis looks at the videos published by a subset of those channels in order to get a sense of the type of news actually watched by the largest numbers of YouTube news consumers. These channels are referred to as “popular YouTube news channels” in this report, and were examined for external affiliation, the presence of a host, ideology and other characteristics. 7 Channels were selected using a recommendation analysis similar to the process used in previous Pew Research Center research on YouTube ( see the methodology for more details).

The first part of this analysis looks at 377 YouTube channels that frequently cover news and current affairs and that had at least 100,000 subscribers in November 2019. Rather than asking people about their experiences with news on YouTube, researchers used both computational tools and human coders to examine some of the attributes of the most popular YouTube news channels and the content of the videos they publish. Complementing the survey results in the previous chapter, this section of the report is based on a different approach to data collection.

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