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.