My interest in this particular consideration piqued earlier in 2023 when I noticed a sharp change in the gender demographics of who views my Youtube channel, which appears to have shifted just as the subject matter of my channel’s content shifted, from being tarot dominant to more I Ching.

Though I don’t have any screenshots to show, back in 2018 and well into 2019, the gender demographics for my Youtube channel was something closer to 20% Male and 80% Female, and that checks out for most of Tarot Tube and witchy content creators, especially among witchy content creators who present as female. I did notice that after 2019 when I started making more Taoist occultism content on the channel, the demographics shifted slightly to 30% Male and 70% Female.

(For clarification, when we say Male or Female, these are per the identifications opted in by the users.)

I didn’t follow the analytics too closely, so I can’t pinpoint exactly when the shift happened, but in early 2023, per the screenshot image above, I noticed suddenly that the demographics were closer to 50/50, which is in fact strange for the tarot and witchy communities and stranger yet for female-presenting content creators like me. You don’t typically see 50/50 demographics for viewership when it comes to tarot and witchy content. There’s typically an underrepresentation of men.

Youtube has this cool feature where you can see the demographics for each video. And that’s where I think it gets interesting.

Although the general stats for my channel are now 50/50, you’ll see from these data reports that, per video, the demographics vary quite a bit, depending on the subject matter of the video.

For videos where the subject matter is esoteric Taoism (see above three examples) or just Taoist metaphysics in general, the Gender demographics is 50/50 more or less, with the percentage leaning male-dominant.

See above for more examples of videos on the subject matter of Taoist metaphysics, demographics close to 50/50, but leaning male-dominant.

Per this site (and see above), the 50/50-ish distribution aligns with general U.S. user distribution by gender for all of Youtube, though according to general Youtube user statistics, it’s Female slightly ahead of Male.

Now here’s where it gets interesting…

Recent videos I posted on tarot and subject matter that is tarot adjacent remain consistently Female dominant…by a lot. See above. It’s not 50/50, in fact nowhere close. It’s 70% Female and only 30% Male. In my video talking about tarot trends, it’s 20% Male and 80% Female.

For my Sightsee the Tarot workshop videos, the Gender discrepancy is even more pronounced, at 20% or under for Male. Any light, fun content I make about the tarot garners between 70% and 80% Female viewership, 20% Male.

Any more esoteric content I make, such as on Taoist spirit maps or on Wu Xing alchemy, it goes down to 40% Female and increases to 60% Male.

What the … (!!??) … I’m assuming the above stats are wrong. Don’t know what happened with the data reporting there.

I do also want to point out the limitations in Youtube’s data reporting. It’s based on user input on their account profiles, and it looks like the options that users can choose from for gender identification are limited.

I haven’t yet arrived at any good hypotheses for all this, but thought I’d share it with you all to see if you have any thoughts.

I also wanted to share in order to collect findings.

(1) If you’re a content creator on Youtube, what are the gender demographics of your channel? Of specific videos? And do you notice any patterns in gender demographics based on the subject matter of the videos?

(2) Do you think there is any correlation between how the content creator presents in terms of gender and the gender demographics of the creator’s viewership?