![]() ![]() And with success: YouTube recently announced for the first time that it generated US$15 billion from advertising in 2019, roughly 10 percent of Google’s overall revenue (Statt, 2020). In the second edition of their book, however, the authors acknowledge that their empirical approach could not be replicated today since YouTube has evolved from being a Web site for sharing videos to a global media company whose commercial interests are centered on the monetization of channels (Burgess and Green, 2018). Paolillo (2008) examined the social network structure of YouTube early on and Burgess and Green (2009) provided the first broad picture of YouTube’s popular culture in the late 2000s by conducting a content analysis of the most popular videos. While most empirical YouTube research has focused on specific content creators, genres, texts, and subcultures, an interest to ‘map’ the platform in order to account for what is on offer has driven research since the beginning. ] and, in particular, how tensions between local and global structures challenge established ideas about media globalization (Cunningham and Craig, 2016). Given its worldwide reach as cultural mediator, YouTube has also attracted scholars researching ‘issues of globalization and cultural difference’ , 2018) have added to a growing body of research focusing on the importance of the video platform for everyday life, entertainment, politics, and the economy. , Burgess and Green, 2018, 2009 Lange, 2019 Lovink and Niederer, 2008 Snickars and Vonderau, 2009), and special issues (Arthurs, , Kessler and Schäfer, 2009 Gillespie, 2010), anthologies ( Beyond these qualifications of YouTube as a threat to democracy, qualitative research has historically offered a more positive side of the platform by examining the quotidian practices of its wide range of amateur and professional users ( Scholars writing for lay audiences have called YouTube the ‘great radicaliser’ (Tufekci, 2018), a ‘far-Right propaganda machine’ (Lewis, 2020), and a platform that inflicts ‘infrastructural violence’ on children (Bridle, 2017). , 2018) and follows recent media controversies on the site’s role in processes of radicalization, mischief, and abuse. This literature is concerned with the implications of YouTube’s algorithms in matters of politics and culture (Airoldi, Long in the shadow of Facebook and Twitter when it comes to data-driven research, YouTube has moved into the center of scholarly interest over the last years, most notably around questions such as extreme political content (Ribeiro, Since launching as a Web site for sharing videos in 2005 and becoming part of Google one year later, YouTube has become a dominant platform that hosts millions of channels and billions of videos, reaching an audience of more than two billion active users every month One of the actors that take a central position in this ‘high-choice media environment’ (van Aelst, But the emergence of a ‘hybrid media system’ (Chadwick, 2013), where traditional actors and networked platforms enter into complex constellations, further adds to the difficulty to assess In the past, researchers could rely on a limited number of newspapers or television channels to assess what kind of media contents are on offer and how their production is structured in organizational terms. ![]() Due to limited data access, painting an ‘overall’ picture of a platform was always difficult for independent researchers and the recent ‘APIcalypse’ (Bruns, 2019) has further exacerbated the situation. The overwhelming majority of studies, however, rely on issue or user samples to investigate particular slices of social media reality. Social media platforms play important roles on a global scale and, consequently, have been studied empirically in many different ways. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the inductive character of this research by highlighting the many follow-up questions that emerge from our findings. Third, we analyze channels according to country affiliation to gain insights into the dynamics and fault lines that align with country and language. Second, we inquire into YouTube’s channel categories, their relationships, and their proportions as a means to better understand the topics on offer and their relative importance. First, we investigate stratification and hierarchization in broadly quantitative terms, connecting to well-known tropes on structural hierarchies emerging in networked systems, where a small number of elite actors often dominate visibility. =36M+) to explore this media system along three main lines. This paper relies on a large-scale sample of channels ( Over the past 15 years, YouTube has emerged as a large and dominant social media service, giving rise to a ‘platformed media system’ within its technical and regulatory infrastructures. Mapping YouTube: A quantitative exploration of a platformed media system
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