Abstract
Nowadays it is easier than ever before to produce films and videos and make them available to a worldwide audience via platforms such as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, among others. The European Space Agency (ESA), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and other similar organisations constantly produce videos aimed at the general interested audience, and distribute them on through their social media channels. Different formats are offered such as educational, informative, news style, science stories, scientist profiles, behind-the-scenes, animations and data based animations. But which of these formats do really stick and why? A simple statistical analysis of 106 videos found on the ESA, ESO and NASA YouTube channels shows that videos based on animations and the representation of data, with little to no explanation and accompanied by music are the more popular in terms of views per month by about a factor of two compared to other types of videos. This can likely be explained by the higher entertainment value of such videos.
Highlights
The production of videos with scientific content in general, and space related content in particular, has seen an enormous rise over the past decade or so
In what follows we present a more extended version of this initial analysis, including content from the European Space Agency (ESA) and European Southern Observatory (ESO) YouTube channels
The most popular video is found on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Explorer YouTube channel and shows an eruption on the Sun observed by SOHO, with a rather wild sound track
Summary
The production of videos with scientific content in general, and space related content in particular, has seen an enormous rise over the past decade or so This can be attributed to the significant lowering of overall video production costs and the ease of worldwide distribution through internet social networks. Space organisations such as the European Space Agency (ESA) [1] and the European Southern Observatory (ESO) [2] have dedicated YouTube channels, whereas the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has several [3], and together they contain many thousands of space related videos. He did a simple statistical analysis on a sample of 49 videos from the GSFC NASA Explorer YouTube channel. In what follows we present a more extended version of this initial analysis, including content from the ESA and ESO YouTube channels
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