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Irish Times
12 hours ago
- Business
- Irish Times
Ireland's niche tour guides: Holidays for foodies, newlyweds and baby-boomers
For US couple Mollie Lyons and Ryan McGrady, hopping from one microbrewery to the next while on a tailored bus tour offered a perfect opportunity to elope. The Pennsylvanians wed overlooking Dunquin pier in Co Kerry , with their parents as the only guests. They poured pints in Páidí Ó Sé's pub and celebrated in 'some of Dingle's finest establishments afterwards over a three-day tour', Mia Tobin recalls of what was, for her, a standout trip in April. It is not the only quirky story that Tobin of Brewery Hops shares with The Irish Times. Her firm is but one of a proliferation of small-bus tour companies established over recent years that offer visitors a more intimate, experiential and tailor-made holiday in Ireland. A windy wedding: Mollie Lyons, Ryan McGrady and tour guide Mia Tobin at Dunquin. With the Central Statistics Office tourism numbers pointing to a continuing decline in inbound visitors, some operators are seeking to stay ahead in a toughening climate by operating in a niche market. READ MORE Such companies provide a welcome addition to the tourism sector's portfolio of guided holidays, according to Fáilte Ireland and, it says, 'they complement rather than compete with larger coach operators, offering diversity in the market and helping to increase dwell-time in destinations'. 'The growth of boutique tours reflects evolving visitor preferences for more immersive tours and often appeal to culturally curious travellers seeking authentic, off-the-beaten-path experiences,' says Paul Keeley, director of regional development, Fáilte Ireland. For Tobin, the quirkiness of these smaller tour groups has included couples getting engaged and old college friends enjoying reunions. She is a Tipperary native and became smitten by the potential of a tourism career while working for a tour company in the wilds of the Yukon in northern Canada. 'By the time I came back home, I had decided to leave the corporate world and never wear a suit again,' she says. Tobin started working with Vagabond Tours in Co Wicklow in 2011 and stayed with them for seven seasons while slowly developing Brewery Hops and going full-time in 2018. 'My customers are mostly couples and friends from North America, typically aged from 40 to 70, culturally curious and with a love of food and drink,' she says. 'They are happy to get off the beaten tour track to meet the local producer and taste their craft produce.' However, day-to-day issues such as rising fuel and accommodation costs, and even the closure of many cafes and restaurants on Mondays and Tuesdays, can cause challenges, she says. Parking can prove difficult depending on the area, while 'Kerry welcomes buses, you are fined in Galway city if you stay over an hour'. Larry Coady, of Anam Croí, talks about Charles Fort at Kinsale Harbour. It was during Covid that Tobin's former colleague at Vagabond Tours, Larry Coady, who had worked as the company's general manager, began to develop his small tours concept, Anam Croí. After being laid off during Covid 'the seed germinated' for his business, which began in 2022 and offers tours for a maximum of 13 people. 'Many of our clients are pretty seasoned travellers. They may have previously done coach tours and are now looking for a more personal experience.' He says 'accessibility to places, unreachable by big coaches, allows [them] to reach some hidden gems while avoiding the crowds at major visitor attractions'. Like with many small tour groups, the majority of Anam Croí's clients are North American and Australian, with 'baby boomers' – people born between 1946 to 1964 – encompassing the main age profile. A group on an Anam Croí tour 'People are increasingly attracted by our scenery as well as the culture, heritage and, of course, the people. Most are pleasantly surprised and blown away by the high quality and freshness of our food,' he says. Discovering familial roots remains a factor, albeit one that is tapering off, Coady says. Rob Rankin's Vagabond Tours has a fleet of 25 small buses on the road When Scottish native Rob Rankin started Vagabond Tours with one Land Rover pulling a trailer in 2002, his friends thought he was mad. Today, Vagabond and Driftwood Tours, based in Greystones, has a fleet of 25 small buses on the road. 'We were the first multi-activity adventure tour company here, blending the outdoors with culture and history as part of a scheduled experience,' Rankin says. He says Vagabond's pioneering concept had led to at least 10 of his former guides having started their own specialised bus tour companies, with a good working relationship with all of them. 'When we started out in 2002, there was very little infrastructure here for outdoor leisure activities. There were no greenways, no bike-hire companies, for example. While land access for hiking can still be a problem, Fáilte Ireland has done really good work over recent years,' he says. He stresses that 'farmers have every right to protect their lands and not be exposed to insurance claims', but that 'more marked trails would, on the other hand, be insured by government and provide an important educational resource for these tour companies'. Rankin says the 'essence of what people want has not changed much since we started. They are still looking for an authentic and quality experience of Ireland, with a relaxed social element'. All three operators are happy to confirm the Trump factor has not been an issue to date 'fingers crossed'. Although tellingly, Tobin says, 'return guests who want to come back next year have said their equity in stocks has plummeted, which is the fund for the Ireland trip'. 'If there is a large economic recession in the US, we will certainly feel the repercussions in tourism in 2026,' she says.
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Bans, partner programmes, baby sharks: A look at YouTube by the numbers
19.4 to 20 billion That's how many videos have been uploaded to the platform over the past 20 years. Precise data is hard to come by, since YouTube only released its first such estimate in April. It tends to be cagey about numbers, and won't allow outside agencies to audit its algorithms to study, for instance, why some videos are promoted over others. 19.4 billion public videos is the estimate by researchers at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (IDPI) of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who created a software program in 2023 to scrape through the platform and arrive at an estimate. 'While at first glance it looks like YouTube is finally sharing some numbers, the flexibility of its language — for instance, does it include private or deleted videos too? — underscores the need for independent research,' says Ryan McGrady, a senior researcher at IDPI. 94% of the site's traffic is driven by videos with 10,000 or more views, according to the IDPI study. These videos make up less than 4% of total uploads. 4% About 4% of videos have no views at all; 74% of videos have no comments; about 32% have no likes, according to the IDPI study. 2.53 billion people use YouTube per month, according to data from Statista for 2025. 491 million people use the platform in India, making it the largest YouTube audience in the world. >3 million creators are part of the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), launched in 2007 to help people monetise their content (via revenue-sharing from advertisements, fan-funding features and product placement). 1,000 subscribers To be eligible for YPP, a channel must have at least 1,000 subscribers plus 4,000 public watch hours in the previous 12 months (with a separate set of parameters in play for YouTube Shorts). 15 billion That's how many times Baby Shark Dance, that absurdly annoying and persistent earworm by the South Korean edutainment company Pinkfong, has been viewed since it was uploaded in 2016. Pinkfong's version (the origins of the song are unclear) was sung by the 10-year-old Korean-American Hope Segoine. 5 billion That's how many times South Korean rapper Psy's Gangnam Style has been viewed, since it was released in 2012. It was the first video to hit one billion views on YouTube. '...what was so special about that one song? I still don't know, to this day,' Psy told The New York Times, in 2022. 405 million With over 405 million subscribers, MrBeast aka Jimmy Donaldson is the world's wealthiest YouTuber. At 27, he is worth an estimated $1 billion and is the world's only known self-made billionaire under 30. He started out at 13, with videos about gaming hacks and gaming fails. More recently, he has had millions of views for videos in which he conducts what is now called stunt philanthropy (Tipping the Pizza Delivery Guy $10,000; Buying a Homeless Guy A Home). He has also segued into food and fundraising. Donaldson owns MrBeast Burgers and the chocolate and snack brand Feastables. He is co-founder of Team Trees, launched in 2019, with a target of planting 20 million trees, via donations; it has raised $24 million so far. In 2021, he also co-founded Team Seas, aimed at ocean conservancy and clean-up operations; it has raised over $30 million. 10 million dislikes The dubious record of YouTube video with the most dislikes goes… to YouTube. The platform's Rewind 2018: Everyone Controls Rewind, a recap of its biggest cultural trends in 2018 — featuring clips posted by Will Smith, Trevor Noah, Bhuvan Bam and others — was accused of being self-serving, gimmicky and forced (among other things). 2.9 million channels containing more than 47 million videos were taken down between January and March this year, for violating guidelines, YouTube has said. Three strikes on YouTube results in automatic termination. The most common violations include spam videos, 'misleading' content, scams and nudity. 2.1 million India topped the list of countries with most videos taken down: 2.1 million, between January and March alone. Brazil (1.3 million) and the US (889,816) make up the top 3. There has been criticism of how loosely 'misleading' is defined by YouTube, and how differently it is enforced in different countries. There has likewise been criticism of how bans on people and changes in regulations are issued, enforced and repealed in arbitrary ways. US President Donald Trump, for instance, was banned from posting on YouTube after the Capitol riots of 2021, but his channel was reinstated in 2023. Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was also banned, in 2018, but resurfaced in a controversial interview with YouTuber Logan Paul the following year. Content moderators, meanwhile, have now been told that up to half of a video may contain offending content, up from the previous cap of 25%, The New York Times reported on June 9. The policy shift, though not publicly declared, was introduced in training material for the army of content moderators that, alongside AI-led algorithms, work to weed out material deemed unfit by the platform.
Hindustan Times
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
Deep in the shadowlands: Check out YouTube's best-kept secrets
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.'
