3 September 2019

Research pick: What sends Youtube clips viral? - "Behaviour of viewers: YouTube videos viewership analysis"

What we often think of as the real world and the online, or digital, realm, are increasingly intertwined in the daily lives of so many people now. Social networking sites boast, for instance, of populations of active users far greater than even some of the most populous nations. New research published in the International Journal of Business Innovation and Research undertook an analysis of users of one of the most well-known parts of the digital world – the video system known as Youtube.

Niyati Aggrawal and Anuja Arora of the Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, in Uttar Pradesh, India, hope to uncover what it is about the millions of hours of videos streamed daily from the site that makes a particular audio-visual snippet go “viral”, whether it is personal, professional, political, or even educational. Youtube has about 1.3 billion users, 30 million a day watching any of 5 billion videos. That is a large fraction of the world’s population and represents, to some, a significant marketing and business opportunity. Understanding user behaviour could allow the commercial world to more keenly tap its potential.

The team’s analysis reveals, perhaps not surprisingly, that music videos are among the most popular content available on Youtube. It is, after all, a free service, and this represents a way to listen to one’s favourites tunes as well as see the artists or an artistic interpretation of those tunes. The team has, however, developed a model of putative virality based on the length of a given video, its age, and various other factors. They hope that their work points the way to a method for mapping in advance how well a video might do in terms of virality. Of course, the internet continues to confound and a video that is superficially the most esoteric and obscure might go viral spontaneously while the best devised and targeted campaign will only rarely achieve such hallowed status in the digital world.

Aggrawal, N. and Arora, A. (2019) ‘Behaviour of viewers: YouTube videos viewership analysis‘, Int. J. Business Innovation and Research, Vol. 20, No. 1, pp.106-128.

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