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.
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Add as preferred sourceTubeCensus 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.
