All about Al Jazeera English YouTube channel — 2019

5 min readFeb 6, 2020

Since 2007, Al Jazeera English YouTube channel has operated as a trusted source of global news, with exclusive interviews, live coverage, and analysis from fields. It is committed to the mission of informing and engaging our audiences no matter who or where they are. It features content from both Al Jazeera’s Digital Division and the English television channel.

How did we start?
Our channel has come a long way. We first started with only TV news packages, then long-form documentaries. But slowly, we diversified our content and started to host organic digital shows created for social media. We’re always trying to provide content that our audience is looking for.

So who’s watching our videos? In easy words, if our audience was a person, it would most likely be a man between the age of 25 to 34 from the United States, or India, accessing our content using his mobile phone.

The channel homepage layout

The Live Stream

Broadcasts live news, sports, shows, and documentaries from the AJE TV channel with an option to engage in a live chat

Breaking news

An auto-updated playlist with the latest breaking news videos, with 213,738 views and counting

Latest news

A playlist with the latest news and current affairs video packages

AJ Go | Al Jazeera Digital Series

A multi-playlists section of six digital series such as Start Here, Al Jazeera Close Up, Fork the System, All Hail the Algorithm, Media Theorised, and NewsFeed (see below)

Al Jazeera breakdown: Politics, analysis & opinion

In-depth analysis of trending and relevant world news featuring guests and correspondents of AJE

Al Jazeera Documentaries

A multi-playlists section featuring long-form films that reflect a range of people, places, and perspectives and challenge dominant views through strong human stories

Popular uploads

A playlist with the channel’s most-watched videos of all times ranked in the order of popularity

Community tab

Recently, we started to take advantage of this space to better connect to our audience by posting content of the below categories:

News: Trending or breaking news with a link to the website article
Memories: A throwback post related to an ongoing event
Poll: A question with multiple responses for the audience to participate
Shows/Documentaries: An image & a link to the recently posted show to drive traffic
GIF: Moving images for a visual listicle

Infographics: Visual storytelling to explain complex issues
Events: International days observed by the United Nations with a link to a relevant documentary

Channel Growth

From April 1, 2007, we’ve witnessed significant growth.

Subscribers

We currently have 4.4 million subscribers. We doubled our subscribers in the past 12 months.

Watch time (accumulated total hours from 2007)

Our total hours of watch time from 2007 to 2019 is 156 million hours.

Regional conflict: this is how we told the story

This is how we covered one of the biggest stories in 2019 — the killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Our first-ever video was a social video about his disappearance on Oct. 3, 2018.

We soon broke the news that Turkish police believe Khashoggi was killed inside the Saudi consulate, which was the start of a comprehensive series of Jamal Khashoggi content all the way to 2020.

In the coming weeks, exclusive interviews, breaking news, explainers, animations, and investigation reports were featured to newly created playlists. Here’s an example on the left.

Our meticulous updates of the story have won the hearts of our viewers.