Advertiser-friendly production? A longitudinal study of supplied content diversity on YouTube

YouTube is the second most visited website in the world with an average of 29.6 billion monthly visits and the largest online content repository with 500 hours of videos being uploaded per minute. Its popularity in the cultural industries has drawn the attentions of researchers to provide an overall characterization of YouTube's landscape from its users (creators and audience) to the available videos (Bärtl 2018, Rieder et al. 2020, Ørmen and Gregersen 2022, McGrady et al. 2023)). However, very little is known about the advertisers' influence in online creative work (Poell et al. 2021, Joseph and Bishop 2024). To run its operation, YouTube heavily relies on revenues generated by selling advertising spaces on the website. This creates an opportunity for advertisers to exercise an economic influence in platforms' governance, i.e. in their design and action decisions (Griffin 2023). This influence was observed after the multiple massive departures of advertisers from the platform between 2017 and 2019. In order to retain brands, the platform introduced new moderation rules affecting users' ability to monetise published content. This example resonates with the works in traditional media economics. With their theoretical model, Anderson and Gabszewicz (2006) found that the production of cultural goods is "shaped by the desire to offer advertisers a vehicle that reaches as many prospective consumers as possible". This logic impacts the characteristics of supplied goods and media firms tend to cater the taste of the majority of the audience. Contrary to traditional media, YouTube does not own nor produce the videos. The content is provided by third-parties: amateurs and professional content creators. Yet, the interplay of the three sides (audience, creators, brands) determines the magnitude of supplied content (Bhargava 2021). This research explores the ways in which advertiser-friendly moderation policies have an influence on content production and provision strategies. How does the supply of user-generated content evolve in regards to YouTube's advertiser-friendly policies? In order to answer to this question, this research relies on a large-scale sample of 34,876,723 videos uploaded on YouTube by 81,963 channels between January 2016 and September 2019. This large sample is extracted from YouNiverse dataset which gathers information of more than 136,000 English-speaking YouTube channels (Ribeiro and West 2021). Three massive brands boycotts happened over the period: in March and November 2017 and in Febuary 2019. To characterize the evolution of content supply, three distinct analytical directions are selected: videos count, videos' duration and used keywords.