No Clear Content Leader on YouTube

Over a third of videos on YouTube uploaded by popular channels were unidentifiable, falling into a miscellaneous category when Pew Research Center analyzed them.

Video games are the single biggest content category with popular channels uploading just under a fifth of videos on the subject. Additionally, video game content on YouTube tended to be longer than other types of videos, according to Pew.

Political content on the video streaming platform was not necessarily U.S. focused. Over one in ten videos talked about non-U.S. current events or politics. Despite this, using the word “Trump” or “president” in video titles was associated with a 36 percent increase in median view numbers when compared to other politics videos without those terms in the title.

Pew identified 43,779 popular YouTube channels during the second half of 2018. The Center defines a popular channel as one with over 250,000 subscribers. During the first week of 2019, Pew pulled all the videos from those channels through YouTube’s API and analyzed the content of the videos and their engagement.