IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamist/v63y2012i3p616-629.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Commenting on YouTube videos: From guatemalan rock to El Big Bang

Author

Listed:
  • Mike Thelwall
  • Pardeep Sud
  • Farida Vis

Abstract

YouTube is one of the world's most popular websites and hosts numerous amateur and professional videos. Comments on these videos might be researched to give insights into audience reactions to important issues or particular videos. Yet, little is known about YouTube discussions in general: how frequent they are, who typically participates, and the role of sentiment. This article fills this gap through an analysis of large samples of text comments on YouTube videos. The results identify patterns and give some benchmarks against which future YouTube research into individual videos can be compared. For instance, the typical YouTube comment was mildly positive, was posted by a 29‐year‐old male, and contained 58 characters. About 23% of comments in the complete comment sets were replies to previous comments. There was no typical density of discussion on YouTube videos in the sense of the proportion of replies to other comments: videos with both few and many replies were common. The YouTube audience engaged with each other disproportionately when making negative comments, however; positive comments elicited few replies. The biggest trigger of discussion seemed to be religion, whereas the videos attracting the least discussion were predominantly from the Music, Comedy, and How to & Style categories. This suggests different audience uses for YouTube, from passive entertainment to active debating.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike Thelwall & Pardeep Sud & Farida Vis, 2012. "Commenting on YouTube videos: From guatemalan rock to El Big Bang," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 63(3), pages 616-629, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:3:p:616-629
    DOI: 10.1002/asi.21679
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21679
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/asi.21679?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Francesca Negri, 2015. "User-generated video parodies in social media," MERCATI & COMPETITIVIT?, FrancoAngeli Editore, vol. 2015(1), pages 75-95.
    2. Weiai Wayne Xu & Ji-young Park & Han Woo Park, 2017. "Longitudinal dynamics of the cultural diffusion of Kpop on YouTube," Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, Springer, vol. 51(4), pages 1859-1875, July.
    3. Oksanen, Atte & Hawdon, James & Räsänen, Pekka, 2014. "Glamorizing rampage online: School shooting fan communities on YouTube," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 39(C), pages 55-67.
    4. Sandra González-Bailón & Georgios Paltoglou, 2015. "Signals of Public Opinion in Online Communication," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 659(1), pages 95-107, May.
    5. Mike Thelwall & David Foster, 2021. "Male or female gender‐polarized YouTube videos are less viewed," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 72(12), pages 1545-1557, December.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamist:v:63:y:2012:i:3:p:616-629. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.