YouTube Users Research Articles

Social media engagement: What motivates user participation and consumption on YouTube?

This study unearths the motives for YouTube user engagement that has been conceptualized as active participation and passive content consumption. In light of the Uses and Gratifications framework, a sample of 1143 registered YouTube users completed online surveys that helped gauge user behavior. Results showed that for participation on YouTube, the strongest predictor for liking and disliking videos was the relaxing entertainment motive; commenting and uploading being strongly predicted by social interaction motive; sharing being strongly predicted by information giving motive. Passive content consumption in the form of video viewing was most strongly predicted by relaxing entertainment motive, and reading comments predicted by information seeking motive. Greater YouTube experience negatively predicted liking, and anonymity played a role in sharing and uploading videos. Males were more likely to dislike YouTube videos in comparison with females.

‘What about the wolves?’: The use of scripture in YouTube arguments

Reading and interpreting the Bible is an important practice in Evangelical Christian communities, both online and offline. Members of these communities employ biblical exegesis not only in convincing others about the validity of their beliefs, but also influencing the development of the social context in which they interact. Thus, reading and interpretation of the Bible serves both a theological purpose, allowing users to provide textual evidence for beliefs, and a practical social purpose, allowing users to map their own and others’ actions onto biblical texts, either to condone or to condemn them. For users who hold the same belief about the importance of the Bible in making moral judgements, the biblical text can be a particularly useful tool to position oneself and one’s actions. In this article, I employ concepts from positioning theory, to analyse how Evangelical Christian YouTube users read across the books of the Bible by treating similar uses of metaphorical language as interchangeable, and using them to position particular users and to make moral judgements about their actions. The analysis shows that reading and exegesis of scripture can be used in dynamic online environments to map characters and storylines from diverse biblical passages onto a particular online argument, providing a common resource for users from different backgrounds and contexts. Findings show that reading and interpretation of scriptures provide a powerful means of claiming authority for Evangelical Christians in the community, and are used to position oneself and one’s actions, influencing the subsequent discourse and emerging social context.

Longitudinal dynamics of the cultural diffusion of Kpop on YouTube

This study takes a longitudinal perspective towards the early stage of social-media-based cultural diffusion. Based on the case of Korean artist Psy’s viral video Gangnam Style, the study reveals the temporal changes of YouTube user characteristics, user-to-user networks, the semantics and sentiment in user-generated comments. Specifically, it shows that YouTube commenters were mostly young and male, with U.S. based commenters dominating the early stage of diffusion. Later, there was an increased share of participation from non-U.S. commenters. Commenting behavior was intensive in early stages, but the interest wore off as time went by. User-to-user interactions based on comment-replying became gradually compartmentalized; in addition, the video and its artist and underlying cultural phenomenon were being evaluated against other popular culture figures and shows. The semantic analysis also shows that commenters were interested in the national cultural origin of the video.

From the couch to the desk: study of gender interactions around Spanish TV series on YouTube

This study explores YouTube users’ creation and consumption of videos related to primetime Spanish TV series, from a comparative gender perspective. The exploration is based on a sample of more than 100 short YouTube videos about 21 Spanish TV series broadcast in 2013 by the three most popular mainstream national TV networks in Spain (Telecinco, Antena 3 and La1). These videos were classified according to the (apparent) gender of their uploaders, their indicators of popularity (number of views, likes, dislikes, comments, and channel subscribers), and the nature of their content (their inclusion of original material with respect to the content broadcast on TV). In addition, the YouTube and TV audiences of the five most popular TV series in 2013 (according to audience share) were examined and compared according to gender. The analysis provided some unexpected results: despite women constituted the majority of the series’ TV audience, male audiences showed greater activity on YouTube around the videos related to such series. Moreover, while men uploaded more videos and scored higher in views and popularity indicators in the video-sharing social network, the videos created by women, comparatively, generated more comments.

Virtual Community Based Destination Marketing with YouTube

YouTube has now evolved into a powerful medium for social interaction. Utilizing YouTube for enhancing marketing endeavours is a strategy practiced by marketing professionals across several industries. This paper rationalizes on the different strategies of leveraging YouTube-based platforms for effective destination marketing by the hospitality industry (hotels) and provides insights on the critical drivers and challenges embedded within YouTube-based community interactions for destination marketing. The comments made by YouTube users have been subjected to a content analysis and the results are reported under the five broad clusters of virtual communities. More broadly, the typology of virtual communities is adapted to evaluate the YouTube platform for effective destination marketing.

Statistical Analysis of Network Based Issues and Their Impact on Social Computing Practices in Pakistan

Social computing and online groups have accompanied in a new age of the network, where information, networking and communication technologies are enabling systematized human efforts in primarily innovative ways. The social network communities working on various social network domains face different hurdles, including various new research studies and challenges in social computing. The researcher should try to expand the scope and establish new ideas and methods even from other disciplines to address the various challenges. This idea has diverse academic association, social links and technical characteristics. Thus it offers an ultimate opportunity for researchers to find out the issues in social computing and provide innovative solutions for conveying the information between social online groups on network computing. In this research paper we investigate the different issues in social media like users’ privacy and security, network reliabilities, and desire data availability on these social media, users’ awareness about the social networks and problems faced by academic domains. A huge number of users operated the social networks for retrieving and disseminating their real time and offline information to various places. The information may be transmitted on local networks or may be on global networks. The main concerns of users on social media are secure and fast communication channels. Facebook and YouTube both claimed for efficient security mechanism and fast communication channels for multimedia data. In this research a survey has been conducted in the most populated cities where a large number of Facebook and YouTube users have been found. During the survey several regular users indicate the certain potential issues continuously occurred on these social web sites interfaces, for example unwanted advertisement, fake IDS, uncensored videos and unknown friend request which cause the poor speed of channel communication, poor uploading and downloading data speed, channel interferences, security of data, privacy of users, integrity and reliability of user communication on these social sites. The major issues faced by active users of Facebook and YouTube have been highlighted in this research.

YouTube Video Promotion by Cross-Network Association: @Britney to Advertise Gangnam Style

The emergence and rapid proliferation of various social media networks have reshaped the way how video contents are generated, distributed, and consumed in traditional video sharing portals. Nowadays, online videos can be accessed from far beyond the internal mechanisms of the video sharing portals, such as internal search and front page highlight. Recent studies have found that external referrers, such as external search engines and other social media websites, arise to be the new and important portals to lead users to online videos. In this paper, we introduce a novel cross-network collaborative application to help drive the online traffic for given videos in the traditional video portal YouTube by leveraging the high propagation efficiency of the popular Twitter followees. Since YouTube videos and Twitter followees distribute on heterogeneous spaces, we present a cross-network association-based solution framework. In this framework, we first represent YouTube videos and Twitter followees in the corresponding topic spaces separately by employing generative topic models. Then, the cross-network topic spaces are associated from both semantic-based and network-based perspectives through the collective intelligence of the observed overlapped users. Based on the derived cross-network association, we finally match the query YouTube videos and candidate Twitter followees in the same topic space with a unified ranking method. The experiments on a real-world large-scale dataset of more than 2.2 million YouTube videos and 31.8 million tweets from 38,540 YouTube users and 39,400 Twitter users demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our solution in which network-based and semantic-based association are integrated.

Gynecologic Cancer Information on YouTube: Will Women Watch Advertisements to Learn More?

The quality and accuracy of health content posted on YouTube varies widely. To increase dissemination of evidence-based gynecologic cancer information to US YouTube users, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsored two types of advertisements: (1) pre-roll videos that users had to watch for at least 5s before seeing a video they selected and (2) keyword-targeted listings that appeared in search results when users entered terms related to gynecologic cancer. From July 2012 to November 2013, pre-roll videos were shown 9.2 million times, viewed (watched longer than the mandatory 5s) 1.6 million times (17.6%), and cost $0.09 per view. Keyword-targeted listings were displayed 15.3 million times, viewed (activated by users) 59,766 times (0.4%), and cost $0.31 per view. CDC videos in advertisements played completely in 17.0% of pre-roll video views and 44.4% of keyword-targeted listing views. Advertisements on YouTube can disseminate evidence-based cancer information broadly with minimal cost.

Science communication and dissemination in different cultures: An analysis of the audience for TED videos in China and abroad

Disseminated across the world in more than 100 languages and viewed over 1 billion times, TED Talks is a successful example of web‐based science communication. This study investigates the impact of TED Talks videos on YouKu, a Chinese video portal, and YouTube using 6 measures of impact: number of views; likes; dislikes; comments; bookmarks; and shares. In particular, we study the relationship between the topicality and impact of these videos. Findings demonstrate that topics vary greatly in terms of their impact: Topics on entertainment and psychology/philosophy receive more views and likes, whereas design/art and astronomy/biology/oceanography attract fewer comments and bookmarks. Moreover, we identify several topical differences between YouKu and YouTube users. Topics on global issues and technology are more popular on YouKu, whereas topics on entertainment and psychology/philosophy are more popular on YouTube. By analyzing the popularity distribution of videos and the audience characteristics of YouKu, we find that women are more interested in topics on education and psychology/philosophy, whereas men favor topics on technology and astronomy/biology/oceanography.

Adaptive Caching in the YouTube Content Distribution Network: A Revealed Preference Game-Theoretic Learning Approach

Cognitive systems are dynamical systems that adapt their behavior to achieve sophisticated outcomes in nonstationary environments. This paper considers two cognitive aspects regarding the problem of distributed caching with limited capacity in a content distribution network that serves YouTube users with multiple edge servers: first, the theory of revealed preference from microeconomics is used to estimate human utility maximization behavior. In particular, a nonparametric learning algorithm is provided to estimate the request probability of YouTube videos from past user behavior. Second, using these estimated request probabilities, the adaptive caching problem is formulated as a noncooperative repeated game in which servers autonomously decide, which videos to cache. The utility function tradesoff the placement cost for caching videos locally with the latency cost associated with delivering the video to the users from a neighboring server. The game is nonstationary as the preferences of users in each region evolve over time. We then propose an adaptive popularity-based video caching algorithm that has two timescales: The slow timescale corresponds to learning user preferences, whereas the fast timescale is a regret-matching algorithm that provides individual servers with caching prescriptions. It is shown that, if all servers follow simple regret minimization for caching, their global behavior is sophisticated—the network achieves a correlated equilibrium, which means that servers can coordinate their caching strategies in a distributed fashion as if there exists a centralized coordinating device that they all trust to follow. In the numerical examples, we use real data from YouTube to illustrate the results.

How Online Access Changed Amateur Video Editing

Abstract Digital technology has often been discussed in relation to how it changed either the production or the reception of audiovisual cultures. This paper will consider a combination of both as a crucial part in understanding strategies of inter- and transmedial amateur creativity. Based on an experimental ethnography of the online video subgenre/subculture “YouTubePoop,” the paper will elaborate on the connection between the individual experience and the creation of digital media. The loose collective of independent amateurs behind the YouTubePoop videos makes use of already existing audiovisual material ranging from television shows to videos of other YouTube users. The re-created remixes and mash-ups are characterized by their random selection of original material and their nonsensical humour. Hence, the rapid montage of this heterogeneous content is just as much part of the intensified aesthetic expressiveness as are the applied special effects available in the digital video editing software. Both aspects highlight the strong interdependence of the rapid accessibility of online content and digital technology and the new aesthetic expressions they are fostering. The paper will show how the experience and navigation of digital interfaces (editing software, media players, or homepages) affect the design and practice of these video-remixes. This will open the discussion about intertextual strategies of media appropriation to an aesthetic and praxeological analysis of media interaction.

What Potential for YouTube as a Policy Deliberation Tool? Commenter Reactions to Videos About the Keystone XL Oil Pipeline

Social network sites have been proposed to influence the way interest groups and citizens interact on various policy topics. User reaction to information received on YouTube can be partially observed by examining comments provided as part of the interface. Using content analysis, this article explores the way YouTube users interact with information provided by media, interest groups, and other groups through user comments. While a large number of comments are found to be ad hominem or off‐topic, in general, user comments on the controversial Canada–U.S. Keystone XL oil pipeline cover collectively the main topic areas found in the December 2, 2013 U.S. Congressional Research Service study of the issues. User comments also reflect a preferential network structure where the existence of a comment makes it more likely that someone will reply to commenters rather than the video itself. The article concludes with some comments on the potential of YouTube as a policy deliberation tool.

Underage access to online alcohol marketing content: a YouTube case study.

With the proliferation of the Internet and online social media use, alcohol advertisers are now marketing their products through social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. As a result, new recommendations have been made by the Federal Trade Commission concerning the self-regulation of digital marketing strategies, including content management on social and digital media sites. The current study sought to determine whether alcohol companies were implementing the self-imposed mandates that they have developed for online marketing. Specifically, we examined whether alcohol companies were implementing effective strategies that would prevent persons under the minimum legal drinking age in the USA from accessing their content on YouTube. We assessed 16 alcohol brands (beer and liquor) associated with the highest prevalence of past 30 day underage alcohol consumption in the USA. Fictitious YouTube user profiles were created and assigned the ages of 14, 17 and 19. These profiles then attempted to access and view the brewer-sponsored YouTube channels for each of the 16 selected brands. Every underage profile, regardless of age, was able to successfully subscribe to each of the 16 (100%) official YouTube channels. On average, two-thirds of the brands' channels were successfully viewed (66.67%). Alcohol industry provided online marketing content is predominantly accessible to underage adolescents. Thus, brewers are not following some of the self-developed and self-imposed mandates for online advertising by failing to implement effective age-restriction measures (i.e. age gates).

More than entertainment: YouTube and public responses to the science of global warming and climate change

The public receives and presents science-related information on global warming and climate change in many forms, but little is known about how this information is conveyed through the Internet. More specifically, very few studies have considered YouTube videos focusing on climate change. This study provides a better understanding of how this type of information may be disseminated through several levels of analysis. For this purpose, the exact narrative for the 10 most popular videos about climate change was first established by concentrating particularly on the presentation of the science of climate change. Then the public’s responses to and engagement in each video were examined through a semantic analysis of comments on the video. The results indicate that, regardless of the narrative, science-based comments dominated, but often discussed climate change in general instead of specific videos to which they were attached. In the absence of gatekeepers, YouTube users rode the coattails of popular videos about climate change and addended the videos’ messages by highlighting evidence of weak, strong, or politicized science.

Comentários no YouTube sobre filmes publicitários dissonantes

The digital environment welcomes people from YouTube global territories and plural cultures generating interesting contemporary communicative practices about movies of all kinds. This study turns to the commercials “dissonance” in relation to traditional television advertising. The goal is to classify the events surrounding these films that received millions of views and thousands of comments. We use Katie Paine’s (2011) categorical research about the types of conversations in which people engage, divided into 27 different categories. Among the interesting results, we have seen that the most watched video does not receive the highest amount of comments and YouTube users do not use the site as a space for dialogue interaction between them. In addition, users resignify films in entertainment, since the main interest is focused on making jokes or irony in relation to humor failures that advertisers have committed. Keywords: communication and innovation, YouTube, advertising, social media.

Participation framework underlying YouTube interaction

Drawing on the literature on interaction in new media and on participation models underlying (non)fictional multi-party media talk, this paper contributes to the burgeoning literature on computer-mediated communication. Specifically, this article advocates a new participatory framework holding for multi-party interaction on YouTube, which is compared to that underlying films and televised programmes. YouTube users’ participation is more complex than television viewers’, who are involved primarily as ratified hearers dubbed “recipients”. YouTubers, on the other hand, engage in asynchronous computer-mediated interaction, changing their participatory statuses at the production and reception ends. The extended participatory framework proposed here for YouTube resides in three levels of communication: the level of the speaker and hearers in video interaction, the level of the sender and the recipient of a YouTube video, and the level of YouTube speakers and hearers who post and read comments, respectively. These communicative levels are realised by: interactants in videos and the (collective) sender, i.e. the production crew (both typical also of televised films and broadcasts), together with YouTube users, who may be video interactants and/or senders, as well as take other participatory roles.

Characteristics of “Music Education” Videos Posted on YouTube

This content analysis sought to determine information related to users uploading, general content, and specific characteristics of music education videos on YouTube. A total of 1,761 videos from a keyword search of “music education” were viewed and categorized. Results for relevant videos indicated users posted videos under 698 different usernames, with postings under a single username ranging from 1 to 51. Users’ self-reported country affiliation varied across 58 different countries. The number of countries represented in this sample indicates YouTube users from around the globe are interested in sharing music education content. Results relating to the content of videos categorized as relevant to music education ( n = 1,352) revealed the most observed categories were performance (36%), followed by teaching (28%), public relations (27%), and industry (10%). Teaching videos were mostly tutorials (65%). Participants across all video categories were predominantly adults, university age, or fit multiple age categories.

YouTube as a source of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patient education

The aim of the present study is to conduct a social media content analysis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patient education videos on YouTube. A systematic search protocol was used to locate 223 videos. Two independent coders evaluated each video to determine topics covered, media source(s) of posted videos, information quality as measured by HONcode guidelines for posting trustworthy health information on the Internet, and viewer exposure/engagement metrics. Over half the videos ( n = 113, 50.7%) included information on medication management, with far fewer videos on smoking cessation ( n = 40, 17.9%). Most videos were posted by a health agency or organization ( n = 128, 57.4%), and the majority of videos were rated as high quality ( n = 154, 69.1%). HONcode adherence differed by media source (Fisher’s exact test = 20.52, p = 0.01), however with user-generated content receiving the lowest quality scores. Overall level of user engagement as measured by number of “likes,” “favorites,” “dislikes,” and user comments was low (median range = 0–3, interquartile range = 0–16) across all sources of media. Study findings suggest that COPD education via YouTube has the potential to reach and inform patients; however, existing video content and quality varies significantly. Future interventions should help direct individuals with COPD to engage with high-quality patient education videos on YouTube that are posted by reputable health organizations and qualified medical professionals. Patients should be educated to avoid and/or critically view low-quality videos posted by individual YouTube users who are not health professionals.

‘Mr G is deffinately bringin’ Sexy back': characterizing Chris Lilley's YouTube audience

This essay investigates how consuming Australian comedian Chris Lilley's TV material on YouTube allows for different forms of participation than are allowed by the experience of watching Lilley's work on broadcast TV. It examines the themes that emerge in user comments and the nature of the pleasure that fans get from Lilley's shows, particularly involving the popular gender non-conformist and female characters, Mr G and Ja'mie. The essay refers back to an earlier essay by the same author, which noted the relative popularity of some of Lilley's characters with professional critics. While there was some congruence between the critical responses analysed in the earlier essay and YouTube users' assessments, there were also themes and responses specific to the YouTube usership (for instance, a relative dearth of homophobic commentary regarding Mr G's sexuality). In offering an analysis of fan-specific data, the essay accounts for the appeal of Lilley's satirical comedy to fan communities that do not typically feature in critical analyses of satirical media. By suggesting how user comments shape others' experiences of the entertainment, the essay re-positions YouTube fans as creators of culturally valuable material in their own right.

Dermatology on YouTube

YouTube, reaches upwards of six billion users on a monthly basis and is a unique source of information distribution and communication. Although the influence of YouTube on personal health decision-making is well established, this study assessed the type of content and viewership on a broad scope of dermatology related content on YouTube. Select terms (i.e. dermatology, sun protection, skin cancer, skin cancer awareness, and skin conditions) were searched on YouTube. Overall, the results included 100 videos with over 47 million viewers. Advocacy was the most prevalent content type at 24% of the total search results. These 100 videos were "shared" a total of 101,173 times and have driven 6,325 subscriptions to distinct YouTube user pages. Of the total videos, 35% were uploaded by or featured an MD/DO/PhD in dermatology or other specialty/field, 2% FNP/PA, 1% RN, and 62% other. As one of the most trafficked global sites on the Internet, YouTube is a valuable resource for dermatologists, physicians in other specialties, and the general public to share their dermatology-related content and gain subscribers. However, challenges of accessing and determining evidence-based data remain an issue.