More than a decade ago the media of entertainment and communication changed forever after the launch of YouTube. The popularity of YouTube over the years has made it the ideal platform for the launch of new artists, companies and even commentators on all the topics you can imagine.
But to find out in detail what are the audience’s favorite YouTube channels and videos, Pew Research Center conducted a study on the most popular channels on the platform (those with at least 250,000 subscribers) and then conducted a thorough analysis of the videos that those channels uploaded during the first week of 2019.
The center identified a total of 43,770 of these channels, in addition to providing interesting data on the most intimate nature of the content of the internet giant’s video platform. These popular channels achieved almost a quarter of a million videos during the first 7 days of 2019, giving a total of 48,486 hours of content. Giving context to this figure, if you spend eight hours a day watching videos without rest, you would need more than 16 years to see the content that these channels have published in just one week.
On average, the YouTube videos that published these hyper-popular channels had a duration of 13 minutes, receiving an average of 58,358 visits during the week that the study lasted.
With these figures, no one can doubt that YouTube has become a great global phenomenon, but beyond pure data, the Pew Research Center analysis also focused on identifying the categories or themes of each of the YouTube videos published through these channels, in addition to examining the keywords used in the titles and descriptions.
Among the most prominent data, the study revealed that videos aimed at children were very popular, as were those presented by children under 13, regardless of their target audience. These videos, regardless of whether or not they were aimed at children, received almost three times more average views of other types. Finally, in his study, Pew Research notes that “the small sample of videos that were directly aimed at a child audience and also showed a child under 13 was more popular than any other content.”
Certain keywords or keywords in YouTube video titles were associated with a greater number of views. An analysis of the study on video titles revealed that the content that mentions words such as “Fortnite”, “joke” or “worse” received more than five times more average visits than videos that do not mention these words. In fact, the relevance of Fortnite is not anecdotal: 18% of the videos of the most popular channels analyzed are related to the world of video games.
Other keywords also function as magnets when it comes to capturing the audience. An example is the use of the word “Trump” which in YouTube video titles was associated with a significant increase in the average views between videos about current events or politics in the United States.
Finally, the study also concludes that cross-promotion with other social networks is a common practice among the most popular channels and that it is associated with an increase in the number of views on the video content. 70% of the videos mentioned other networks of mass use, such as Instagram or Twitter in their description, and got more views than those who did not.
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