| ▲ | applfanboysbgon a day ago | |
> 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. | ||
| ▲ | somenameforme 20 hours ago | parent [-] | |
I don't think your numbers are reasonable. Widespread use of fake subscription services distorts things but plenty of people get CNN level views with orders of magnitude fewer than 50 million subs. Here [1] is an account whose median view is CNN prime-time level. She has 186k subs. 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... | ||