"Torture the data, and it will confess to anything.” - Ronald Coase
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Trending on YouTube

Statistical analyses of trending videos on YouTube

 

Trending on YouTube

 
 

This project is an exploratory data analysis on the factors which make a video trending on YouTube.

 
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Top Video Categories

YouTube videos are split into 16 video categories ranging from Sports to Education and everything in between. In looking at the data set of trending videos, the top five video categories in terms of frequency are:

  1. Entertainment

  2. Music

  3. How-to and Style

  4. Comedy

  5. People and Blogs

 
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Variance of Videos

When trying to analyze the videos’ metrics for patterns, I quickly saw that the metrics such as Views, were tremendously varied among each of the top five video categories. Videos in some categories had drastically different number of views while the videos in other categories had relatively the same number of views.

 

effect of video engagement

Intuitively, one may think that what makes a video trending is how many views a video has. Lots of digital platforms base the success of a video on how many views it gains. However, my analysis shows otherwise. As previously stated, the number of views within each video category varies significantly. So other measure is driving YouTube to mark these videos as Trending?

The best measure, from my initial analysis of the data set, to determine whether a video is trending or not is the video’s engagement with its audience. The number of likes, dislikes and comments look to be a good indicator of the video’s potential to be flagged as Trending.

The three plots show that video engagement is not strongly correlated with the number of views of a video. The more views a video has doesn’t necessarily mean more likes, dislikes or comments, further showing that engagement, more so than views, plays a role in determining whether a video becomes Trending or not.

 
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EFFECT OF PUBLISH TIME

Trending videos are constantly changing as they are, by nature, a live pulse of what people across YouTube are watching and engaging with. Given that the top Trending videos are constantly changing, it is safe to assume that videos that become trending do so in a very short amount of time. The graph here shows exactly this. Videos typically become trending within 1 or 2 days after they are posted.

 

In today’s world, with attention spans generally decreasing coupled with the prominence of viral video culture, it is not a shock that the trending videos are those quick, flash in a pan videos - videos who manage to receive heavy viewer engagement in a very short amount of time.