Understanding popularity on YouTube

Abstract

YouTube is one of the most popular and largest video sharing websites, which also has induce Social Network features. YouTube has also become one of the biggest promotional and advertisement platform on the internet, thanks to the number of users it attracts on its platforms in terms of content generators and consumers. While some content is popular, some other content fails to attract enough viewers. This thesis investigated the popularity of YouTube videos and channels by analyzing 500,000 videos. We analyzed this data to gain insight into popular Videos on YouTube. In other words, to see what’s common among those videos. We tried to analyze the key features of YouTube popularity using metrics like views, likes, dislikes, comments, title, description, and video duration time. In particular, we performed descriptive and exploratory analysis and used techniques like text mining to analyze comments on videos. In addition, we also performed cross-cultural analysis in terms of popular videos to understand which kind of videos are more popular in which geographic locations. Our findings reveal that different types of videos are popular in different places leading to the fact that regional cultures do affect popularity of different videos.