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by applfanboysbgon
57 days ago
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> a mid-tier YouTuber, literally. They hit < 1mil at prime time. By "mid-tier YouTuber", I suppose you mean a top 0.00001% youtuber or thereabouts? Only the top 100ish with 50m+ subscribers translate to an actual audience per video of 1m+ (outliers notwithstanding), and you're comparing a US news network against an entertainment platform with a global audience of billions. I'm going to guess that CNN is still more influential to US politics than a gaming channel in India or Indonesia, even if a few of the latter get more views. Not to say that cable news influence hasn't waned from its peak, obviously, but I don't think the comparison to "mid-tier Youtubers" really holds up at all. |
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Beyond that it's a power law distribution. Some guy who uploaded 1 video for a friend counts as a 'YouTuber', but obviously they do not matter in terms of overall competition. We're only talking about the channels that are regularly uploading content of some reasonable standard. And amongst that group - CNN level is very much in the mid-tier range, and I think that's being generous. There are currently about 70k channels with at least a million subs.
As for influence, I don't think news has much of any influence at all in US politics anymore. They blew it all by going hyper-partisan for the sake of views - moderate short to mid-term gains for catastrophic long-term consequences. Pretty much the standard of most US businesses now a days. In terms of confidence in institutions, television news now ranks lower than every measured institution, except Congress. [2] They scored 11%, Congress scored 10%. And that's with piggy-backing off the phrasing of simply "television news" from the poll, instead of just cable news. Broadcast news is going to score significantly higher in confidence than cable news.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@andreabotezmusic/videos
[2] - https://news.gallup.com/poll/1597/confidence-institutions.as...