YouTube Channels, Subscribers, Uploads and Views: A Multidimensional Analysis of the First 1700 Channels from July 2022

Abstract

In a world of online social life and social media development, more people are interested in developing video content-based businesses, including YouTube channels, and information sharing with the main purpose of making money. This paper conducts a multidimensional analysis of the first 100 YouTube channels (July, 2022) from each of the 17 domains identified, using SocialBalde.com. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the crucial factors to take into consideration when starting a social media business on YouTube, namely the domain and description of the channel. The objective is to equip future social media entrepreneurs with two elements that should be considered when starting an online business. We perform a two-fold analysis, by exploring correlations between data for each channel and conducting a semantical analysis of the text describing each channel. In spite of the numerous research papers related to YouTube, none of them focus on this topic, i.e., the practical transformation of information into data that can be measured with multidimensional instruments. The results have interesting implications regarding how a successful channel should be developed; we also present sustainable guidelines for social media entrepreneurs to follow during the process of starting a business. Consequently, a successful online business is partly the result of the domain chosen and the channel description.