There's a secret side of YouTube, just beyond the guiding hand of the algorithm – and it’s nothing like what you know. The vast majority of YouTube's estimated 14.8 billion videos have almost never been seen. Until now.
... To unveil this side of YouTube, McGrady and his colleagues built a tool that dials videos at random. The scraper tried more than 18 trillion potential URLs before it collected a big enough sample for real scientific analysis. Among the findings the researchers estimate that the median video has been watched just 41 times; posts with more than 130 views are actually in the top third of the service's most popular content. In other words, the vast majority of YouTube is practically invisible. Most of these videos aren't meant for us to see. They exist because people need a digital attic to store their memories. It's an internet unshaped by the pressures of clicks and algorithms – a glimpse into a place where content doesn't have to perform, where it can simply exist. ...
... "We tend to assume the reason to use social media is to try to be an influencer, either you're Joe Rogan or you're a failure. But that's the wrong way to think about it," says Ethan Zuckerman, who leads the YouTube research as the director of the University of Massachusetts' Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure.
YouTube tells the BBC it's incorrect to say the platform doesn't let you see videos with low views or content from small channels. The algorithm's job is to help people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value, YouTube says, and sometimes that does include videos with a small number of views."The magic of YouTube is that whether a video has 60 views or six million, people are able to find community, learn a new skill, be entertained, or share their voice with the world," says Boot Bullwinkle, a YouTube spokesperson. "Every channel starts from the same blank slate, from which they can build an audience and grow a business."
Zuckerman and his colleagues weren't the first to go looking for YouTube's underbelly. Between 2009 and 2012, for instance, iPhones included a feature that let users post videos straight to YouTube with a few taps. YouTube reported that mobile uploads jumped 400% a day. Unless people added a custom title, the name for all these videos followed a standard format, which makes them easily searchable over a decade later. A few online tinkerers have explored these videos, which apparently number in the millions. One even built a custom player that cycles through them.
If any of these videos went viral, it would mean something went terribly wrong. That's not what most of YouTube is for – Ethan Zuckerman
Without the algorithm's recommendations, you'll find that YouTube is a study of the everyday, Zuckerman says, people documenting small moments in their lives and using the available tools to exchange ideas.
In South Asia, for example, Zuckerman says YouTube and similar networks seem to function as a video messaging tool for people with low or no literacy. Most of YouTube comes from outside of the US, in fact. Zuckerman's lab has estimated that over 70% of YouTube videos are in languages other than English. You find fisherman in South America waving from a boat, or two construction workers speaking in Hindi about how much they miss home. Videos like these fall under what he calls "friends and family" content, where comments and interactions all come from people who seem to know the user personally.
"If any of these videos went viral, it would mean something went terribly wrong. That's not what most of YouTube for," Zuckerman says. ...