Youtube in a language you learn is a good source of information and content to increase your vocabulary etc, but here comes the problem. There is a lot of content, even with millions of views in english. Same for my native language, even tho there is only aroudn 40mln speakers of it. If I search for most popular channels about X, most of the videos have like half a million, million+ views etc. But it isnt like this for japanese for some reason? Most popular videos about the same topics have like 12k views, maybe 100k at most. So like, do they not use youtube? Everyone I asked told me they use the same social media, mostly, as americans, but it has literally zero sense in a context that even top japanese youtubers makes worse views than some average of polish, with like 1/3 of people who speak this language. So like, is there something like japanese youtube or smth? With stuff like games review, podcasts, video essays, dumb stuff etc?
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I’m not really even sure about the premise of this, really.
For example, one of the top Japanese YouTubers, [Hikakin](https://www.youtube.com/@HikakinTV/videos), has 1090万 (10.9 million) subscribers and most of his videos easily top 1-2 million views.
A random song I picked by [King Gnu](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/z1vkzn/where_do_japanese_watch_stuff/) (a very popular Japanese musician) has 1188万 (11.88 million) views.
I’m not sure what exactly you’re looking at, but is it possible the Japanese artists/videos you’re looking at just aren’t *that* popular or mainstream? As u/Jwscorch says, it’s kind of pointless to compare Japanese videos to English videos given the far wider audience of English speakers (and wider reach of Western culture in general) worldwide, but if you’re comparing to Polish or whatever I doubt the above numbers for Japanese YouTube are significantly smaller or less impressive.
(Like the other response says, ニコニコ動画 is/was a thing, but nowadays it’s far less mainstream than YouTube/Twitch/Twitter/Instagram/etc.)
There’s nico nico douga which was more popular than YouTube for a long time, so even though YouTube is popular nowadays in Japan, views still get split by nico nico in some cases. That being said you can easily find Japanese YouTubers with millions of views and subs.
This is sort of tangential and maybe not a part of what you’re noticing, but there was a time where I found it difficult to find Japanese content on YouTube. Most of what I was finding was, like, language learning content or content popular with language learners. If I searched for a specific channel, I could find it, but general searches in Japanese returned very few Japanese videos before, seemingly, trying to get me to watch English videos.
Since then, I’ve changed my YouTube language preference to Japanese and I felt like I was finding much more Japanese content. It could be a coincidence, but it feels like YouTube started to allow me to see past the Japanese learner sphere (if that really exists) and into the broader world of Japanese content. If that’s a real factor (not sure it is) it’s possible that’s part of why Japanese YouTube feels so underwhelming to you. It definitely felt underwhelming to me.
My other theory regarding why my old searches and recommendations were so poor is just that I wasn’t watching **that** much content yet and my search terms were probably less natural. It seems more likely than my language preferences making a difference, but I remember at the time the difference in search results felt dramatic.
Either way, **TL;DR** the phenomenon of not being able to access new Japanese content definitely existed for me, and could be part of why YouTube feels sparse & unpopular to you.
If you want to know what’s popular in Japan on Youtube, click your profile picture in the upper right, set your location to Japan and then visit the trending section. Plenty of videos with hundreds of thousands or even millions of views to be found there. They’re mostly shit, of course, but that’s Youtube for you.