The number of views per day on BitChute, a social video-hosting platform launched in 2017 as an alternative to YouTube, is approximately 300K views.

This is what Milo Trujillo, Cody Buntain and Benjamin D. Horne discovered while doing research for their paper about content and discourse on BitChute.

Their paper is published in April 2020.

They observed the platform for five months and during that time they did not see significant upward trends in uploads.

According to them, around 3000 videos is uploaded on BitChute per day.

They noticed slight upward trend in views, peaking at just under 400K views over the five months.

„This insignificant growth is likely due to the small time frame in which the data was collected. To gain a better understanding of the platforms growth, we look at Google trends interest over all of 2019. When looking at the Google Trends data, we see that BitChute is growing in interest slightly faster than other alternative platforms like Gab, 4chan, and Voat“, wrote Trujillo, Buntain and Horne in their paper.

Their goal was to to see what types of videos and content producers does BitChute attract and what content receives engagement.

They found a significant amount of gaming content on the platform, however, the content receives very little engagement in comparison to news and politics.

BitChute engagement

According to the uploader-selected categories, ‘Gaming’ only receives 3.87% of the views and 3.21% of the comments, while ‘News & Politics’ receives 48.47% of the views and 54.04% of the comments.

When analyzing how well the uploader-selected categories align with the actual video topics, they discovered that News and Politics has names of politicians and political conspiracy theories.).

„Interestingly, we find that the Education category contains a mix of flat earth videos, Adolf Hitler documentaries, ‘Men Going Their Own Way’ (MGTOW) videos, and videos related to Christianity. The default category ‘Other’ contains a mix of almost every topic, including videos on Adolf Hitler, Alex Jones, Donald Trump, Gaming, and various conspiracies“, explained Trujillo, Buntain and Horne in their paper.

Most viewed videos on Bitchute

Among most viewed videos in the five month period they examined the platform were;

one video by Soph – self-proclaimed satirist banned by YouTube which had 115K views

two videos by Mister Metokur, one in which he ranted against the furry fandom subculture and another against the transgender community (59K and 78K views)

followed by one episode of Infowars (70K views and 11 comments)

and then a QAnon video – „deciphering secret messages from Trump“ which is claiming that Trump told his supporters, through secret messages in his tweets, that the “El-Paso shooting5 was a setup by the deep-state.“ (55K views and and 42 comments).

Top channels on Bitchute

Researchers also analyzed top channels ranked by the number of videos, views, and comments.

„Almost all of the top viewed channels are self-proclaimed news services, journalist, or political commentary (8 out of 10). These include Tim Pool, an American journalist known for live streaming the Occupy Wall Street protests, Ron Gibson, a regular contributor to Infowars, the Infowars channel itself, and Styxhexenhammer666, a libertarian social commentator known for promoting alt-right talking points. Another news-like channel in the top 10 is x22report, which promotes a wide range of proTrump, U.S political conspiracies including QAnon and deep state theories. Overall, the channel is very similar to Alex Jones’ Infowars, including advertising for end-of-the-world/doomsday prepping supplies.“, wrote Trujillo, Buntain and Horne.

They also assessed the amount of hate terms used in the comments on BitChute videos.

„We found that 75.09% of comments contained at least 1 hate speech term and the average number of hate terms per hate comment is 5.93.“

Bitchute and hate speech

These are their conclusions:

„We found that the platform’s engagement and activity is highly skewed, with only 12% of channels receiving 88% of the views and 87% of the comments on the platform. The channels in this 12% are heavily focused on news-like commentary and conspiracies. We found that the content in both the videos and comment threads contains a high amount of hate speech“

„Furthermore, we found a recruitment video for the terroristic, neo-Nazi militia, Atomwaffen Division, on the platform. This video was surrounded by other anti-Semitic content and calls to violence.“

„In conclusion, BitChute appears to be an increasingly popular video-sharing platform, especially for the dissemination of news and political content. As is common among fringe and alternative platforms, much of BitChute’s content is politically extreme and hateful, even more so than one might find on similar alternative platforms like 4chan or Gab. Concerningly, BitChute contains a more diverse mix of content than Gab, including much more gaming and entertainment content, increasing the likelihood that an unradicalized individual may be incidentally exposed to more extreme views. This exposure is especially troubling given the large volume of hate speech, white nationalist recruitment, and calls for violence present on BitChute.“

Read their research HERE