YouTube Videos Produced by U.S. Public Libraries

Analysing Factors that Increase Views

Abstract

Public libraries are increasingly posting content on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. In this paper, we focus on YouTube videos produced by U.S. public libraries and identify the factors that increase their views. Specifically, we compared 107 popular videos (with over 700 views) and 109 unpopular ones (with less than 12 views) and analysed their differences. This research revealed that the unpopular videos were often too short (less than 30 seconds) or too long (more than 20 minutes). The popular videos overall were more informative than unpopular ones (e.g. with longer titles to identify the contents of the videos). Furthermore, the ratios of tutorials and story times for popular videos (28.0% and 21.5%, respectively) were significantly higher than those for unpopular ones (6.4% and 10.1%, respectively). The ratios of reports on events and event notices among popular videos (7.5% and 12.1%, respectively) were significantly lower than those for unpopular ones (26.6% and 25.7%, respectively).