Who are the bookTubers? characteristics of Spanish-language literary video bloggers

Abstract

This article offers a statistical description of the key characteristics of Spanish-speaking booktubers, young people who use YouTube and other digital platforms to share content about books. To establish their demographics, the distribution of their popularity, the evolution of their production, two complementary methods where used: on the one hand, digital methods, to obtain data from 464 channels and 51,322 videos through YouTube’s API v.3; on the other hand, an online survey (n=71) that describes some aspects of their cultural consumption. The results show that vast majority of the YouTubers are women, in their twenties, and have higher education. The dominant countries are Mexico, Spain and Colombia. The rise of BookTube channels happened between 2013 and 2015; afterwards, their production has stabilized. Despite the diversity of channels, more than 90 percent of the viewers are concentrated in the Top 20% most popular channels. These results allow us to recognize basic cultural patterns from booktubers and set the foundations for further observations of their evolution.