Many Turn to YouTube for Childrens Content, News, How-To Lessons
A new Pew Research Center survey of U.S. adults finds that these users are turning to YouTube for much more than entertainment. Roughly half of YouTube users say the platform is very important for helping them figure out how to do things they've never done before. That works out to 35% of all U.S. adults, once both users and non-users of the site are accounted for. And around one-in-five YouTube users (representing 13% of the total adult population) say it is very important for helping them understand events that are happening in the world.
The findings also highlight YouTube's key role in providing content for children. Fully 81% of all parents with children age 11 or younger say they ever let their child watch videos on YouTube. And 34% of parents say their child watches content on YouTube regularly. It should be noted that YouTube explicitly states that the platform is not intended for children younger than 13, and that the site provides a YouTube Kids option for children that has enhanced parental controls.
But even as many users are turning to content on YouTube to help them understand the world and learn new things, large shares say they encounter negative experiences with content on the platform. Around two-thirds of users (64%) say they at least sometimes encounter videos that seem obviously false or untrue while using the site, while 60% at least sometimes encounter videos that show people engaging in dangerous or troubling behavior. And among parents who let their young child watch content on the site, 61% say they have encountered content there that they felt was unsuitable for children.
The survey also illustrates the prominent role the site's recommendations play in its users' consumption habits. These “up next” videos are selected by the site's algorithm and appear alongside or below the video viewers are currently watching. Depending on a user's individual settings, these videos may play automatically once the video they are watching has finished. Some 81% of YouTube users say they at least occasionally watch the videos suggested by the platform's recommendation algorithm, including 15% who say they do this regularly, according to the survey.
Although the site's recommendations drive a significant share of its users' time on the site, the inner workings of the algorithm itself are largely opaque. To further understand the nature of the video recommendations on YouTube, the Center conducted a companion analysis of the videos suggested by the site's recommendation algorithm. To do this, we conducted more than 170,000 “random walks” through the videos recommended to viewers of popular YouTube channels using the site's public application programming interface (API) over a six-week period in summer 2018.
These random walks worked by:
1) Selecting a video at random from a custom list of more than 14,000 popular English-language YouTube channels (defined as those with at least 250,000 subscribers), based on one of four selection criteria also chosen at random.
2) Selecting one of the five recommended videos listed in the YouTube API for that video.
3) Repeating the above step until a total of five videos – the initial starting video plus four subsequent recommendations – had been collected.
All told, these 174,117 random walks resulted in 696,468 total encounters with 346,086 unique recommended videos. For more detail on how this analysis was conducted, see the 
These users are also turning to YouTube for reasons other than news. Around seven-in-ten (68%) say the site is important simply for helping them pass the time (with 28% saying it is very important to them for this reason). Around half (54%) say it is important for helping them make purchasing decisions. Younger adults are especially likely to say that YouTube is important to them for passing the time. Four-in-ten users ages 18 to 29 say the site is very important to them for this reason, but that share falls to 30% among users ages 30 to 49, 20% among users 50 to 64 and 14% among users 65 and older.
At the same time, a large share of YouTube users say the site is important for helping them figure out how to do things they haven't done before. Fully 87% of users say the site is important for this reason, with 51% saying it is very important. And the ability to learn how to do new things is important to users from a wide range of age groups. Roughly half (53%) of users ages 18 to 29 say the site is very important to them for this reason, and that view is shared by 41% of users ages 65 and older.
In some cases, users' responses to these questions show substantial variation based on how frequently they visit the site. Most notably, people who use the site regularly place an especially high level of importance on YouTube for learning about world events. Some 32% of users who visit the site several times a day – and 19% of those who visit once a day – say it is very important for helping them understand things that are happening in the world. That compares with 10% of users who visit less often.
In other cases, more- and less-frequent users of YouTube have similar views of the platform's importance. For instance, a 56% majority of users who visit multiple times per day say the site is very important in helping them figure out how to do new things. But that view is also shared by a plurality (46%) of those who use the site less than once per day.
It is common for users to encounter troubling or problematic content on YouTube
These survey results also highlight the prominent role that YouTube plays in the lives of parents and children. Some 81% of all parents with children age 11 or younger let their child watch videos on YouTube, with 34% indicating that they allow their child to do this regularly.
Each random walk worked as follows:
- First, we used the YouTube API to randomly select a channel from a list of every English-language channel with at least 250,000 subscribers that researchers could identify (14,509 channels in total).
- Upon selecting a channel, we then randomly selected one of the top five videos for that channel as ranked by either relevance, date posted, rating or view count. The criterion used for each walk was chosen randomly prior to selecting a video.
- After selecting the starting video, a new video was then chosen at random from the top five recommended videos for that video, as listed in the YouTube API at that time.
- The above step would then be repeated until a total of five videos (the initial video plus four subsequent recommendations) had been collected.
All told, these 174,117 random walks resulted in 696,468 total encounters with 346,086 unique recommended videos. We will discuss in more detail below that these figures are different because some videos were recommended more than once over the study period. Unless explicitly noted, all findings in this report include only those videos recommended by the site's recommendation algorithm and not the initial starting videos.
Like other content delivery algorithms, the YouTube recommendation engine attempts to customize its suggestions based on an individual user's prior activity and browsing behavior. Thus, different users watching the same video might be served different recommendations based on the system's calculations of their interests. To maintain a consistent methodology built on the likely experiences of a baseline viewer of these popular channels, this analysis utilizes the base recommendations from the YouTube API. As such, these findings represent the recommendations a viewer of these channels might expect to see if they were viewing YouTube anonymously, and/or without being logged into their account.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
Four specific types of content made up a sizable majority of the 50 most-encountered videos in this analysis. Fourteen of these videos were music videos by major commercial artists, typically the “official” video posted to the channel of the artist who created the work. Eleven were compilation videos showing highlights or surprising moments from televised competition shows. Titles like “Top 10 Most UNFORGETTABLE Singing Auditions ALL TIME” and “UNBELIEVABLE! Top 10 Shocking Blind Auditions the Voice 2018” are representative of this genre.
In keeping with the large share of parents who let their children watch videos on YouTube, a substantial share of these videos (11 in total) were oriented toward small children. In fact, the single video in this dataset with the largest number of total recommendations over the study period (615) was an animated song compilation titled “Bath Song | + More Nursery Rhymes & Kids Songs.”
These frequently recommended children's videos also highlight the ways in which children's content on YouTube can differ from more traditional programming for young people. Next: Acknowledgements
