by Peter Hontaru
Are there differences between YouTube Trending videos in English-speaking countries (Canada, Great Britain, United States)? If yes, which aspects of the videos cause these differences?
All throughout this analysis we will generate questions, answer them with data and then further refine these questions based on what was discovered.
- Content Creators / Marketing Agencies who want to better understand their audience and tailor their content effectively
- Data Science enthusiasts, as they might get new ideas for how to use R (for beginners) or see other people’s analyses (for intermediates)
- those generally interested in YouTube
YouTube has been an influential source of knowledge both in my professional life as well in my personal goals/ambitions. Thus, I thought it would be interesting to explore this dataset and gather insights in order to better understand the platform.
- there were medium to high correlations between our main variables
- despite a similar number of total trending videos, Canada has more unique videos (60%) versus Great Britain (8%) and The United States of America (16%)
- most videos in CA only trend for 1-2 days (80%) versus GB and US where it isn’t uncommon to trend for up to 10 days (highest 38 days), showing a need for consistent innovation
- generally, 75% of videos trend within their first day and 95% of videos trend within the first 5 days. In CA, videos usually take 1-2 days to reach trending, while in the US and UK it could take up to 5-7 days
- only 25% of all videos receive over 1 million views and 5% receive over 5 million
- Music and Entertainment are the most common trending categories
- News & Politics is the most controversial category (as judged by % of dislikes), while Pets & Animals and Comedy are the least disliked
Trending videos work alongside the home page to provide users with content to watch. While the home page is highly personalised (via the YouTube algorithm) based on previous views, what the user watched longest, engagement, subscriptions, the trending page is very broad and identical across all accounts. Since it shows this feed to millions of users, it serves as a great source of views for content creators (think viral videos).
- contains >120,000 videos across three countries (Canada, Great Britain, United States of America)
- 8 months of Daily Trending data between 2017-11-14 and 2018-06-14 (approx 200 videos/day/country)
- all the data is downloaded from https://www.kaggle.com/datasnaek/youtube-new - Raw data files are available within the “raw data” folder
Full analysis available:
- at the following link, in HTML format (recommended)
- in the Exploratory-Data-Analysis.md of this repo (however, I recommend previewing it at the above link since it was originally designed as a html document)