The Paralympics on YouTube: Alternative content creation and the digital consumption of the Paralympics

Abstract

This article aims to explore the digital consumption of the Paralympic Games on the video-sharing platform YouTube to understand how the International Paralympic Committee (IPC) engages consumers in a digital setting, enabling an ‘alternative’ consumption of the event. Using YouTube Data Tools, we have automatically scraped data from 17,701 YouTube videos from Paralympic Games’ channel. After data manipulation and consolidation, statistical analyses were performed in order to understand how the IPC has adapted to the algorithm logic of platforms. Our findings demonstrate that YouTube should be comprehended as complementing and substituting television as the traditional medium of sport consumption. Thus, the digitalisation of the sport industry adapts and continues, rather than revolutionises, the symbiotic sport/media relationship. Whilst digital revolution allows the IPC to reach wider audiences by bypassing a traditional media editorial logic, it does so within the algorithmic logic of platforms resulting from the unpaid digital labour of users.

Rol de autoridad y análisis del discurso en torno al cáncer de mama en las comunidades de YouTube

“…Los datos se han capturado el 22 de febrero mediante el software YouTube Data Tools (Rieder, 2015), una herramienta utilizada en diferentes investigaciones sobre la popular plataforma de alojamiento de video (Abao et al, 2021;Hanchard, 2022;Petersen-Wagner;Lee Ludvigsen, 2023;Rieder et al, 2020;Prevete et al, 2021). Este programa permite recopilar los contenidos que YouTube muestra cuando se realiza una búsqueda sobre un tema y también sus vídeos 'relacionados' que responden al algoritmo propio de recomendación y que suele compararse con una caja negra (Stokel-Walker, 2019;Xie et al, 2023).…”