TubeCensus maps YouTube channel counts and subscribers over time
This research introduces TubeCensus, a large-scale project providing a transparent and replicable census of YouTube channels and their subscriber counts over time. The study highlights that the official YouTube API does not offer this granularity of data, focusing on YouTube's role as a central contemporary mass media platform.
Key Takeaways
- TubeCensus is described as a transparent, replicable, large-scale census of YouTube channels.
- The project tracks subscriber counts over time, not just a single snapshot.
- The official YouTube API does not provide this historical subscriber-granularity data.
- The paper frames YouTube as a central contemporary mass media platform.
Why It Matters
TubeCensus gives researchers and industry watchers a more detailed way to measure YouTube channel growth over time, filling a gap left by the official YouTube API. That matters because subscriber history is the kind of baseline data needed to study platform-scale audience changes, and the paper explicitly frames YouTube as central to contemporary mass media. The key signal to watch is how broadly TubeCensus is adopted as a reference dataset in future ICWSM or related platform-analysis work.
Read full article at ojs.aaai.org
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