I'm excited to announce https://transparency.tube  - the first comprehensive look at YouTube politics. We track the views of more than 8K political channels every day and provide an interactive viz for you to see what's happening daily on YouTube.

We have grown from 800 manually-classified channels to 8K thanks to @samuel_clark 's clever model that discovers & classifies them. Believe me, classifying this many channels is not humanly possible. Check out this Clark & Zaitsev pre-print for deets
https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.09892 

Use the Channel Bubbles viz to see a summary of what has happened on youtube in the last 7 days (or selected period). Dig into detail on any channel, or look at different metrics like views, subscribers, or watch time.

The Top Videos List shows the most viewed videos, with the ability to narrow this down to groups/time-periods you are interested in.

Given how important YouTube is for modern politics and culture, we hope http://transparency.tube  will become a trusted source of information for anyone who wants to understand the galaxy of YouTube political content (targeting English speaking countries).

We find it useful and fascinating, a few things that stand out so far:
- Independent YouTube creators get most of the attention in the press, but traditional/mainstream media outlets have accounted for more traffic than “YouTubers” over the last year and a half.

- Only looking at the most popular channels or videos provides a misleading representation of the whole. For example, late-night talk shows have mostly top tier channels, compared to partisan right, which is a bigger group of channels but is mainly mid and low-range channels.

- Despite YouTube’s efforts to limit the reach of conspiracy content, it still accounts for a significant amount of traffic on the platform.

All of this data is available to use for research. We are happy to provide info and work with journalists writing on YouTube to improve the poor quality of information that exists right now.

** Housekeeping **

Official account with weekly updates with the top video's and the latest happenings: @transparency_tb

Code & Data: https://github.com/markledwich2/TransparencyTube

Article: https://transparency.tube/about/ 

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