The symbiotic relationship between citizen observers, audiences and news professionals carries through to who posted the videos once they were produced. But here, citizens played a larger role than news organizations.
Almost two-thirds of the most viewed videos on YouTube (64%) were posted by citizens; 36% were posted by organizations. In other words, while news organizations played a larger role in creating the most popular news content on YouTube, citizens were the primary agenda setter in terms of posting it.
This in part is because nearly four-in-ten of the professional news videos were posted by viewers. In these instances, then, the news organization either did not object to having its content enter the YouTube stream or had not bothered to track its content.
On the flip side, however, almost all of the videos produced by individuals (97%) were also posted by individuals as opposed to a news organization.
