YouTube Stars Turning Viewers Into Readers | Hacker News Reader

YouTube Stars Turning Viewers Into Readers

nytimes.com

66 pointsacsillag18 comments

No mention of Pewdiepie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b037fgPG9Ow

If you look into past NY Times articles of PewDiePie, you'll probably see that they try to paint a certain picture of him. Writing positively of him wouldn't fit their narrative.

Oh, nice catch. I didn't even notice it was NY Times. They've done a number of hatchet jobs on Pewdiepie; probably jealous that he has a much bigger reach than they do.

Pewdiepie does not have a bigger reach than the NYT. That’s ludicrous.

The NYT seems to have a bigger reach, but Pewdiepie comes pretty close. Nytimes.com gets approximately 350 / 30 = 11.6 million visits per day[1]. Most of Pewdiepie's videos seem to have between 3 and 10 million views[2], with the average being somewhere around 5 million. Assuming that every nytimes.com user visits once per day and everyone within Pewdiepie's reach views each of his videos once, The NYT has approximately twice the reach of Pewdiepie.

[1] https://www.similarweb.com/website/nytimes.com [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/PewDiePie/videos

If about half of these visits to NYT are daily users and the rest were once a month then they would have a reach of about 180 million/month. I would say that is a low estimate since I end up on their site once or so a month and most people I talk to (outside the US) make references to their site that imply similar usage internationally.

I'm not sure how frequent this "pewdiepie" releases videos from that youtube link, but if it were once a week then he(?) has a reach of 20 million/month if he has no permanent fans. That seems like a high estimate given that some percentage of the 60 million channel subscribers must look at most videos.

Think past quantitative reach and imagine qualitative. The New York Times reaches heads of state, business leaders, intellectual elites, etc. pewdiepie reaches an audience primarily looking to fill moments of leisure.

As outrageous as that might sound, at first glance, it's not really that far-fetched.

Pewdiepie is still the biggest channel on YouTube, with nearly 65 million subscribers, and 10+ million daily views, he has quite a global reach [0].

While the NYT is pretty much only a thing in the US, with a circulation of around 4 million [1], which afaik also includes it's 3 million subscribers [2].

Sure, the NYT also gets read outside of the US, but I doubt that happens on the same scale as Pewdiepie is consumed outside the US. Ask young people outside the US which of those two they actually know, and consume, and people are far more likely to answer "Pewdiepie" than "the NYT".

[0] https://socialblade.com/youtube/channel/UC-lHJZR3Gqxm24_Vd_A...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times

[2] https://www.businessinsider.de/the-new-york-times-soars-past...

What narrative, the narrative that people with large audiences of impressionable young people shouldn't casually say the n-word and pay poor people to write anti-Semitic messages as a joke?

Yeah, reading the headline I thought it would definitely have a big section about Pewdiepie. He's literally the most subscribed YouTuber by millions, and puts out lengthy book review videos monthly.

Wasn't even aware that pewdiepie did book reviews. I feel like the media gives him way too much dirt for he does though (e.g. the nazi joke he made), he's doing a lot of good for the younger age community.

This is amazing. I've always thought Youtube as one of the lesser evils of social media websites.

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