I have always been bothered by people who say “Oh this is bad, and people will know. They’re watching,” while others simultaneously say, “No one is paying attention. Who cares?”
Who is right? Who exactly is watching what, how much are they watching, and where are they watching things? “Things” being political news. Where do people go for political news? How many of these people are there? What are they watching? This area of discussion is what I call the “Media Consumption Question.”
Now, obviously this is a massive question which would merit the writing of many books after decades of research. I am also only going to look at a small microcosm of the media sphere to try to touch this Media Consumption Question. YouTube.
First, I want to stress that I do not want to try to convince anyone that this article is gospel. The aspects I discuss are far far far far too small to make a determinative conclusion on the topic of the Media Consumption Question as a whole. I only want to trigger deeper thought on the subject because I think the microcosm I discuss is fascinating.
That being said, why look at YouTube of all places? Consider these points.
Approximately every household in the United States has a Television set (TV). According to Nielsen, 125 million households have a TV in them, or 97% of homes have a TV for 315 million Americans to watch (www.nielsen.com/...). Nielsen also reports that in May of 2024, YouTube comprised about 10% of all TV viewership in the United States (www.cnbc.com/....). In May of 2024, Americans only watched YouTube on their TVs 10% of the time. This would imply that if every household has a TV and 10% of the time Americans spent their TV was on YouTube, then at least 10% of the whole American population spent their time on YouTube.
This is a high volume of consumption — remember that 10% number.
Consider now too that only 14% of YouTube viewership is done through a TV (backlinko.com/...). This means that A LOT more time is spent by Americans watching YouTube outside of their TVs — more than seven times as much. Now add the statistic that 238 million Americans watched YouTube through the month of April (with a modern population of 341 million), meaning somewhere around 70% of Americans watched YouTube.
Why does that matter?
In 1940, there were approximately 70 million newspapers in circulation (either weekday or Sunday newspapers) for 132 million Americans (www.pewresearch.org/...). That is a rate of 53% of the population getting a newspaper. Today there are about 40 million newspapers in circulation for 341 million Americans — a rate of about 11%.
This all means that YouTube consumption, on TV alone, is comparable to newspaper consumption in 2024. This also means that YouTube consumption in total is comparable, if not superior, to consumption rates of newspapers in 1940 (before TV existed). If we look at the radio, the 1940 census reported that 28 million households had access to one radio (or about 83% of the population). This puts YouTube usage (access) by Americans in 2024 on a comparable level to the radio in 1940 and higher than newspaper consumption in 1940.
It all averages out to Americans spending roughly 46 minutes on YouTube every single day (explodingtopics.com/...). I do not know about you, but that 46 minutes statistic reminds me of the romanticized image of the American sitting down and reading the newspaper with coffee before going to work.
I believe this allows me to make two fair statements:
1) YouTube is ubiquitous in the United States, and
2) If people search actively for political news, YouTube will be a primary source of searching — just the same as the radio or newspaper used to be in days of old.
Now, if those hypotheses are true, it would make sense to see the numbers of views on YouTube as a window into the Media Consumption Question.
Just looking at the biggest event that has happened recently, the shooting at the Trump Rally, we can get a window into the Media Consumption Question on YouTube. I link to the videos of each of these channels, so that you can look at the numbers of views of the videos for yourself.
It is extremely important to consider that all of these YouTube views are from people seeking out media on their own. These YouTube views are not from people turning on ABC News at 7pm and just soaking in whatever is fed to them. These are people, in theory, who are actively seeking out this media for consumption.
Please also consider that the numbers I use are from the time of writing, and the numbers may have changed from the time I was writing them. They should not change drastically from what I count, but you can observe the numbers for yourself on YouTube.
On MSNBC, their first video covering the Trump Rally Shooting netted 322,000 views.
On CNN, their first video gained 2.3 million views.
On Fox News’ YouTube Channel, their first video of the shooting gained 10.1 million views.
Meanwhile, an independently run YouTube channel called “Beau of the Fifth Column” ran a video on the Trump Rally Shooting, and that video accrued 430,000 views.
Now this is where I make things interesting. Each of these sources of political news media can represent a different degree on the political spectrum. MSNBC is “liberal/DNC.” CNN is regular folks (people who aren’t typically tuned into or care about politics). FOX represents conservatives. Beau of the 5th Column represents a group of my labelling — “Shifters.” Shifters are people who are tired of watching the same old stuff from the same old outlets but still want to listen to political commentary, and they are not RNC/Trump conservatives. More on Shifters later.
YouTube has a function where if you like a channel’s content, you can subscribe to the channel. This does a few things. 1) It allows you to be notified in the future of any videos that channel uploads, and 2) it signals basic approval or interest in that channel’s content. For this discussion, it also gives us something to base viewership numbers of specific videos off of.
In theory, someone will more likely than not watch a video from a channel that they subscribed too. The closer the number of views a video gets approaches the number of the channel’s subscribers, the higher the assumed enthusiasm viewers have for the media being put out.
Most people who watch YouTube are not subscribed to the channels they are watching videos from. Most simply access YouTube, watch a video, and then leave without interacting with the video itself or the posting channel. This means in reality only a percentage of the counted views of any given YouTube video are going to be from people that subscribed to the posting channel. Regardless, if we go off the assumption that 100% of the views of a video came from people who are subscribed to the channel that posted the video (for the sake of easiness), we see an interesting picture.
MSNBC has 6.89 million subscribers, while their Trump Shooting video gained 322,000 views — a 4.6% subscriber viewership rate.
CNN has 16.6 million subscribers, with 2.3 million views on their first video of the Trump Shooting. This is a 13.8% subscriber viewership rate.
FOX News has 11.5 million subscribers, and with 10.1 million views on their video they had an 87% subscriber viewership rate.
Meanwhile, Beau of the 5th Column has 873,000 subscribers. His video of the Trump Shooting netted 430,000 views. This leads to a 49% subscriber viewership rate.
Those numbers alone might make you raise an eyebrow, but here is where I put things into perspective and really run with my theory.
Consider this. MSNBC, CNN, and FOX all have national footprints and are household names. All of them are go-to sources of the latest political news for different political spectrums. In theory, if you are a conservative who wants to seek out more conservative political commentary, you will look up FOX News on YouTube.
Now why aren’t there more views on “liberal” news channels like MSNBC?
Where are the liberals who are tuned in?
Where are the people who do not really identify with political parties who are seeking more information?
Why do MSNBC and CNN numbers look so… low?? This is where the Shifters and my theory come into play.
To put this into scope, I need to talk more about FOX News.
FOX News is somewhat of an important outlier because people who have subscribed to and actively watch FOX News do so religiously. The individuals who watch FOX News do so as a part of their life style. Additionally, there just are not many other alternatives to FOX News for extreme Far-Right commentary that scratch the same itch.
Therefore, it is fair to state that the overwhelming majority of people who watch FOX News are individuals who are Republicans. These are conservatives who are seeking out MORE political commentary on their own. The people viewing FOX News on YouTube are the conservatives who are part of the Media Consumption Question — they are the ones who are watching and paying attention on the conservative end of the spectrum. This explains the seemingly high viewer enthusiasm on FOX News when nearly all of their subscribers tuned in for an important event. Conservatives aren’t really going to go anywhere but FOX News.
Considering that the RNC/Trump conservatives only account for less than 1/3 of the US population (one third of 341 million being about 113 million Americans). Suddenly, the 10 million views on the FOX News video on the rally shooting seems oddly small. This juxtaposition makes the CNN and MSNBC viewership enthusiasm seem that much smaller as FOX News had many more views than MSNBC and CNN combined.
Because the CNN and MSNBC numbers are so disproportionately smaller, we can see that there appears to be a trend of non-conservatives gravitating away from mainstream media (what few of them there are) and moving towards independent journalism (to sources such as Beau). These are the Shifters.
This point is even more clear when you look at independent liberal media news channels on YouTube that are not part of the mainstream media.
MeidasTouch (www.youtube.com/...), has had video viewership numbers of 255k, 330k, 70k, 388k, 589k, 959k, 784k, 1.4m, 613k, 1.1m, and 379k since their first video addressing the Trump Shooting (which had 516k views). MeidasTouch has 2.56 million subscribers.
Beau of the 5th Column also boasts comparatively impressive numbers of 148k, 127k, and 66k views since he uploaded his first video on the Trump Rally shooting.
This is while, for comparison, MSNBC’s videos (since the shooting) had gotten views of 3k, 32k, 3.3k, 9.2k, 64k, 4.3k, 24k, 33k, 7.6k, 52k, 193k (a video connected to the shooting), 47k, 206k (another video connected to the shooting), and 40k. CNN has had similarly poor performances on their other videos.
Some of these channels, like MeidasTouch, have uploaded a similarly large number of videos to MSNBC, yet they maintain a clear dominance in viewership numbers over MSNBC. These channels have also done this despite being run by either small teams of individuals, or by individuals alone. These numbers of viewership tend show a trend of YouTube viewers moving away from consuming mainstream media for political news to independent sources.
Taking everything I have said, I would make these hypotheses:
1) Relative to the level of viewership of YouTube by Americans as a whole, not many people are watching political news or commentary at all. This explains the small viewership numbers on mainstream media YouTube channels that feature political news/commentary, despite YouTube’s clear dominating presence in the media sphere.
2) There is a clear large chunk of people that are watching political news/commentary who are watching FOX News. These individuals could be representative of conservatives and conservative enthusiasm for political media as a whole.
3) Not that many people are seeking out mainstream media outlets, like CNN or MSNBC, for political news/commentary at all.
4) Viewership on mainstream media YouTube Channels bump up for flashpoint news events (like the Trump Rally Shooting) and then immediately drop off, while viewership of independent news YouTube channels is overall more consistent.
5) Many more of the people who are actively searching for political non-conservative commentary are seeking out the YouTube channels of independent news sources rather than mainstream media outlets.
At the end of the day, it is important to remember what I discuss here is only a tiny microcosm of the Media Consumption Question. Who knows if this tracks for other forms of media, such as Facebook or Twitter, but no less interesting. Regardless, if this observation of YouTube can be applied broadly, it would suggest that no one is really watching or paying attention to things in mainstream media right now about political news or commentary.
