Balloon effect in news market
“Aging YouTube,” a phenomenon referring to the surge of right-wing YouTubers with the backing of the older generation of internet users, has intrigued sociologists as digital technology is thought to be the domain of millennials.
According to Big Foot, which analyzes social media for marketing analytics, right-wingers dominate the list of the top 10 political commentary YouTube channels with the most subscribers. Conservative channel “Shin-eui-han-su” (a stroke of genius) tops the ranking with 1.08 million subscribers as of Wednesday, followed Roh Moohyun Foundation with 1.1 million, Jin Sung-ho TV and Pen &Mike. Nine out of the top 10 YouTubers in the political news category are conservative commentators.
Roh Moo-hyun Foundation, which opened in 2011, is the only liberal YouTube channel that made the list. Together with the rapid downfall of TV news viewership, Big Foot’s real-time YouTube trend has an alarming implication for the media industry — news consumers, particularly the older generation, are migrating from TV to YouTube. For this column, I chose to use the term “news consumers,” instead of viewers or readers.
In the digital era, I think those who are watching or reading the news are no longer viewers or readers.
In the past decade, there has been a seismic shift in the news market. Multiple suppliers based on various types of platforms are competing and seeking people to consume their news services. After cable news channels aired their first news services in 2011, news consumers have gradually migrated from national television news shows. The surge of JTBC through the Choi Soon-sil scandal, which cut former President Park Geunhye’s tenure short, was a turning point.
Another migration of news consumers from cable TV networks to YouTube has been seen in the last few years.
Technology is often mentioned as the epicenter of the consumer-driven revolution in the news market.
I agree, but there is one more critical factor that needs to be taken into account in the analysis of the rise of YouTube. As experts put it, the surge of conservative YouTubers is a phenomenon deeply associated with the media’s credibility crisis.
There has been a ritual in the media industry which has repeated whenever a government change occurs. Leadership reshuffles in KBS and MBC were one of the first steps that followed the new president being sworn in. CEOs of public television have been replaced with those who are close to the new leaders.
Mass media is an effective tool to disseminate certain ideas among the public. So new leaders were inclined to fill the key posts with their cronies.
What we’ve seen is that cronyism backfires. The falling viewership of TV news is a reflection of the media’s credibility crisis.
In the digital era, news consumers have lots of options. There are plenty of alternatives to TV news, prompting consumers to go for news sources they believe they can trust. It is reasonable to presume that consumers’ migration from offline to online news services will be more visible in a polarized society such as Korea.
As we’ve seen recently, particularly after the Cho Kuk scandal, clashes between conservatives and liberals became fiercer with no signs of being eased.
Under a political landscape like this, expecting liberals or conservatives to change their standpoints toward certain issues appears to be unrealistic. Steering their attitudes in a certain direction by disseminating ideas that can curry favor with a sitting president or the ruling camp seems to be a daunting job.
In public opinion, the balloon effect seems to play out behind the scenes. Squeezing air in a balloon doesn’t remove it, the air is merely pushed in another direction. Diffusing certain ideas through the mass media can no longer be effective in changing public opinion because people just move in search for other sources of news services that they believe credible. This is what we are seeing these days.