6 Culture Trends Worth Watching: The IMAX Boom, the Reality TV Bust, Count Binface, and More

Welcome back to the Monday Roundup!

The Monday Roundup is a bonus edition featuring data-driven culture stories, curated datasets, and recommended reading. Given the strong response to this format, I’ll be publishing it weekly for the foreseeable future.

Your regular Wednesday essay stays free for everyone—this is strictly additive.

Today’s edition has six new data stories. Free readers get the first two; paid subscribers get the full thing, plus datasets and recommended reading. Enjoy!

In Today’s Roundup:

Original Data Stories: YouTube’s surprising gaming dominance, the IMAX boom, why hit tracks have a small army of songwriters, whether Disney’s live-action remake machine is losing steam, what Love Island reveals about reality TV’s low hit rate, and how Count Binface became Britain’s viral political star.

Recommended Reads: Notable data journalism and pop culture reads from around the web.

Unique Datasets: Ten publicly available datasets, covering everything from television episode plots to Pitchfork album reviews to eight decades of New York Times articles.

Trend 1: YouTube Is for Gamers

I recently built a Google Trends equivalent for YouTube to quantify the terms that most frequently appear in the site’s top videos. My initial guess was that this list would feature newly released trailers, music videos, and sports highlights. In essence, I was expecting data reflective of my YouTube homepage. But, as is always the case, my predictions never align with the zeitgeist.

In fact, when I reviewed my initial output, I barely recognized 50% of the top terms. And thus I found a new way to feel old. That’s because I am not, nor have I ever been, a gamer, and the most frequently used terms on YouTube revolve around gaming.

At first, I assumed this to be a mistake. But when I looked at the site’s top trending videos over the last few months, gaming content comprised anywhere between 55% and 70% of all entries.

In short, the most popular content on YouTube involv…