YouTube Trends Analysis

Our Goal

Help marketing agencies and content creators better understand the latest trends on YouTube & find what drives views and virality.

Data Source

• Kaggle dataset collected from YouTube API
• Included country information from United States, Great Britain, Canada, Germany, France, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and Mexico
• Date range was Nov. 2017- June 2018
• Time zone used was GMT +1 (Glasgow, Great Britain)

Our Process and Tools

• Extract- Kaggle, Excel
• Transform- Python, Jupyter Notebook, SQL, Tableau
• Load- Tableau
• Machine Learning- Google Colab, XGBoost

Questions we looked to answer

• What types of trending content are people most likely to watch and/or engage with?

• Are there specific channels/events marketers should work with/sponsor?

• When should content creators post their videos to have a higher chance of trending? Is there a posting strategy to consider?

• Can we statistically prove the most important factors that go into making a video trend?

What did we find?

• People watch music/entertainment, but engage with causes they care about

• Trending happens immediately, but chances are better posting on a weekday.

• Tags are critical to trending while subscribers are not as valuable

• Music drives views, causes drive engagement

• First 24 hours are key

Machine Learning

• Instead of looking up what increases views, we wanted to see what increased engagement. Therefore, we focused on how to increase 'Like' count
• Using regression methods like Lasso, Elastic Net, Ridge, and XGBoost, we were able to confine our variables to a 78-83% R square which gives us confidence in the fit of the line.
• View count, dislike count, comment count, number of tags, tags in description, and external website links in description all factored into predicting higher 'Like' count.

What does it all mean?

• While aligning with music video releases are a sure way to reach a wider audience, brands should also look to work with content creators that drive engagement given it may be a more cost-efficient way to reach audiences who are very leaned in

• Post on weekdays to maximize opportunity for trending

• Getting a video to trend is critical for movie campaigns to get incremental views

• Marketers should make sure they have a good tagging strategy in place to increase their chances at gaining likes → virality

Our Slides and Visualizations can be found here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1dOlPg_edCZL9FTaLHF2NVNUrv79g9obzRtLnynRUXKA/edit#slide=id.g8b9b2062a4_0_166