Platform Transparency as Ways of Knowing the Audience: Data Analytics on YouTube

This article situates digital platforms in the larger history of media distribution, where technological mediation meant an increase in reach, but at the price of making mediation and reception opaque. Because platforms claim to surveil all user-content interactions within their gambit, they promise to make the audience knowable and transparent. Through a case study of YouTube Studio, a dashboard that offers data about the audience to YouTube content producers, the article argues that this form of transparency is selective, in that it is skewed toward behavior rather than sociodemography, and that this selectivity is shaped by the political economy of platforms. Ultimately, this analysis asserts that dashboards not only offer data about their audiences to content producers but also shape the latter's subjectivities.