1y ago

More than 15% of teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok ‘almost constantly’

www.cnbc.com More than 15% of teens say they're on YouTube or TikTok ‘almost constantly’

A new Pew Research Center study finds that more than 15% of teens say they're on YouTube or TikTok "almost constantly."

More than 15% of teens say they’re on YouTube or TikTok ‘almost constantly’::A new Pew Research Center study finds that more than 15% of teens say they're on YouTube or TikTok "almost constantly."

62 comments

I wonder how much this compares to kids and tv viewing habits before household internet.
- Man even Cinemax didn’t have hard core porn and beheadings. The shit that those two apps show you should never be seen by anyone.
  
  You think teens are being exposed to porn and gore on YouTube and tiktok??
  Not, ya know, pornhub and liveleak?
  That's a pretty fuckin weird take since YouTube and tiktok are well known for overly aggressive content moderation
  
  Yeeeeeah but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of teens aren't actually filling the majority of their view time with porn and trauma. Though I'm sure there is some significant porn watching, the beheadings part is far less so I am willing to bet.

I bet about 15% of teens also wildly exaggerate.
- omg that is sssooooo exaggerated like 1000% take that back pls
- I'm surprised it's that low, it's certainly looking more than that here. It's not getting any better with parents using phones to shut their little ones up, toddlers are growing up with them around the dinner table.
- You missed a 0 on the end of that number
  Source: "a teen"

What are they doing there? I spend a lot of time on YouTube (probably max 2 hours per day), but if there are no new videos from channels I subscribe I just quit.
- I've spent over 2,000 hours on YouTube this year alone and am in the target demographic of this study. I watch a lot of videos in the background while I work, commute, or just chill, to keep myself stimulated.
  Although not all of the content I watch is necessarily educational, a grand majority of it is. Whenever there's a science video in my feed, I'll probably click it. I'm subscribed to Veritasum, TED, Vox, No Boilerplate, etc.
- They are using YT shorts. The next video auto populates with something the algorithm thinks you'll watch for 15 seconds and it's usually correct. Its like a slot machine. Quick and easy entertainment that people can lose hours in
  
  YT shorts is garbage. It will show the same videos to me over and over again.
- I'm on it about ten hours a day when I'm at home, sometimes 15. About the same amount of time I used to listen to the radio - it's great background for when I'm coding, modelling, video editing or whatever plus a great way of relaxing in-between as well as being a great learning resource.
  It's great because I can choose what to watch based on the task I'm doing, background waffle about interesting but missable subjects works well for a lot of stuff. I like twitch too but at it's live I can't walk away so easily if I get absorbed into someone's stream so find YouTube much more functionally useful.
  
  15 hours...sleep for 8 hours, and you have 1 waking hour where YouTube isn't playing.
  I guess old people are/were like this with TV and/or radio, though, so it's nothing new.
- you're just not subscribed to enough channels. I probably spend 4h+ a day on average, mostly watching channels I'm subscribed to, and I don't usually watch everything. Ah, and no shorts, that's garbage.

Back in 2005, I never would have thought YouTube would be so popular as it is now. But here we are over 15 years later. Teens probably think Facebook is uncool, and apparently they're not all on Instagram "almost constantly" the same way as TikTok. Yet there is YouTube, chugging along, hugely popular for young and old.
- Video is expensive so competition is harder to kick up unless it does something very different.
- I think it makes sense. Visual media just work well and universally so for all humans I’d say. All the other limited platforms are stuck with some indelible fashion like a haircut from a certain era and so always show their age eventually.
  On top of this I think there’s an argument that YouTube have been uniquely successful in their attempt to take a middle path between profitability and facilitating creators, the result of which is that you get a performant and easy to use service (with a pile of ads) that connects with what feels like a huge range of real people talking about real interests.
  
  YouTube has pushed itself more as a product than a community. People won't stop using Amazon because it's 'uncool'. I imagine this is similar.
- Instagram is for 20-40s, Facebook is 30s+, TikTok is 20s and under.
  
  You people make up the wildest shit lol.
- I mean of course YouTube is popular. User-generated videos have always been popular (even pre-internet, like home videos on TV etc), but it's never been the case that storage and bandwidth was cheap enough to not operate a website with videos at a loss.
  The only ones being able to operate such a site are entities that have lots of spare cash. Otherwise, if the site gets too popular, it'll have to shut down or become unusable because of having to limit access behind paywalls or similar, hugely stifling its popularity and likely killing it.
  Google created a very good service with YouTube that no one else could compete with because no one had so much money to "burn". They kept this up for years to a point where it didn't really make sense for neither creators nor viewers to want to go anywhere else.
  And now there is a lot of good content on YouTube. The content is good because creators can actually live off the YouTube payments, thus being able to spend a lot of time on the videos. It will thus stay popular, because creators will not start risking their livelihoods on any other platform.

Now we need Neil Degrasse Tyson to buy these platforms and switch all the videos to physics and math videos
- No offence, but please not him
  
  He's the best and I'm tired of hiding that. The silent majority has been silent too long

So... 16%?

And? I put in thousands of hours of video games and TV.
Tiktok is going to be the video games will rot your brain of this generation.
- I don't know, seems like TikTok may actually be doing that though. The format completely destroys attention spans, it spies on you for the Chinese, and is a huge propaganda machine.
  Video games don't do any of those things and at least with TV, you have to pay enough attention for 20 minutes to an hour to get anything out of it.
  
  there is a ton of propaganda in TV too. And even on videogames, to a lesser extent. An example, the other day my niece was playing FarCry 6 and when I read about the story it was clearly American anti-Cuba propaganda, appropriating "revolutionary fighters" that fight to make Cuba a capitalist democracy.
  Edit: just for clarification, I do not support the Cuban government, but neither I do support the US and how historically they've wanted to make Cuba one of their satellite countries.

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