Deep in the shadowlands: Check out YouTube's best-kept secrets

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

Most of YouTube looks nothing like the YouTube we know.
Dive below the surface layer of gaming clips, music covers, challenges and dares, product placement and stunt philanthropy, and one finds… Indian construction workers talking about how much they miss home, moving tributes to lost pets, children showcasing amateur but delightful rap skills through songs about the many moons of Neptune.
There are also intimate home-video-style vignettes of birthday parties, travel velfies, heartfelt messages to friends and raw footage from dashcams.
'YouTube is the default video arm of the internet, in large parts of the world,' says Ryan McGrady, senior researcher at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (IDPI) of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 'Some of it looks familiar, some of it is strange, some of it is personal, and a lot of it is really just banal pieces of people's lives.'
McGrady stumbled into this vast landscape that most of us never encounter, in early 2022. He was setting out to study instances of hate speech on the platform, and thought he'd start by finding out how many videos YouTube actually hosted.
It turned out there was no official answer (YouTube has since released one estimate, this April, of 'more than 20 billion uploads').
'My co-author, (IDPI director) Ethan Zuckerman, calls these 'denominator problems',' McGrady says, 'in the sense that we have easy access to numerators — for instance, 10,000 videos that are popular — but denominators are hard to find.'
How does one go about gathering an estimate for a platform that sees about 20 million videos uploaded a day (according to more YouTube data from April)?
At IDPI, the attempt involved creating a software program that estimated the number of videos by randomly generating and testing tens of thousands of YouTube IDs. This is how they realised that most of YouTube — a world McGrady refers to as Deep YouTube — is made up of videos that have never been uplifted by an algorithm.
As of April, the scraper had found 19.4 billion videos hosted on the platform.
About 4% of these have no views at all, 74% have no comments, and 32% have no likes, the researchers found.
Videos with 10,000 or more views drive 94% of the site's traffic but make up less than 4% of total uploads.
While this clearly works as a business model— ad spend on the platform has risen sharply and consistently, and YouTube is the worlds second-most-visited website after Google — it also creates a sense of sameness that does not reflect the true nature of the content on the platform, McGrady says.
More than meets the AI
What is the true nature of the content on YouTube?
In a paper published in Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media in 2023, McGrady and his team traced a rich diversity in usage across the platform.
People who speak different languages, for instance, use the platform differently. A larger portion of videos in Hindi are intended for relatives and friends of the content creator (rather than a broader audience), their ongoing research shows. Many were photo slideshows set to popular music, IDPI found.
Videos uploaded in Korean and Russian, meanwhile, were found to contain more news-driven content. In Russia, the platform had emerged as the go-to resource for unfiltered news from around the world. 'Lately, YouTube has been throttled and is harder to access there, but it persisted for an amazingly long time. Perhaps it was too popular to ban outright,' McGrady says.
Meanwhile, worldwide, a fifth of all YouTube videos are videogame clips.
Fringe feeds
How strange are the strangest videos?
Some clips are just 10 seconds of part of someone's face as they try to figure out a new phone camera. There are snatches of inaudible martial-arts instruction. Two hours of choir practice.
The spookiest thing to him, McGrady says, are the videos with no views at all.
'You'd think at least the uploader would watch their own post, right?' he says. An explanation for this could be the third-party apps on phones and videogame consoles, which make it easy for people to create clips and upload them directly to YouTube in bulk.
Yet it is in these videos, the ones with few views or none at all, that real life is being archived, he adds.
A group of friends celebrating a birthday shouldn't have more than 20 views, as he puts it. It is only meant for, say, friends who couldn't make it. But it is such videos, more than the viral content, that serve as time capsules: of how we lived, what we wore, how we celebrated, the languages we spoke and people we loved.
Who we really were, in other words, when almost no one was watching.
'Humanity doesn't look like the most popular YouTube videos,' McGrady says. 'Humanity is much more like the family birthdays, selfies, work meetings, vacation footage… the bulk of the footage that actually makes up YouTube's content.'