A Preliminary Study of Charismatic Speech on YouTube: Correlating Prosodic Variation with Counts of Subscribers, Views and Likes

Abstract

This paper is a first investigation into the influence of the pitch range and the intensity variation on the number of subscribers, views and likes of YouTube Creators. A total of ten minutes of speech material from five English and five North-American YouTubers was analyzed. The results for pitch range and intensity variation suggest that an increase in both parameters results in higher subscriber counts. For views, there was no influence of pitch range, but an increase in intensity variation results in a lower number of views. Pitch range and intensity variation had no influence on the like count. Furthermore, both origin and gender had an influence on the results. Ultimately, this study will provide further information for the phonetic research of charisma (i.e., the perceived charm, competence, power, and persuasiveness of a speaker), as it is suspected that the acoustic features that have so far been connected to charisma also play an important role in the success of a YouTuber and their channel.

Measuring the impact and reach of informal educational videos on YouTube: The case of Scientific Animations Without Borders

“…Overall, the analysis of the relationship between channel user-activity and YouTube engagement metrics reaffirms other findings' statistically significant correlations between YouTube popularity metrics (view count, likes, watch-time, subscriptions, and shares) and YouTube content (Chatzopoulou et al, 2010;Lopezosa, Orduna-Malea, & Pérez-Montoro, 2019). Similarly, the findings that more view count, watched, likes, and shares garnered more subscribers and that more view count garnered more watched, likes, shares, and subscribers also reaffirm other findings that correlate popularity metrics with a higher chance for subscribers (Berger, Niebuhr, & Zellers, 2019;Langworthy, 2017;Lopezosa et al, 2019). For monetization and ad-driven contexts, these correlations with view count may already suffice as useable data for decision-making (Kononova et al, 2020, although see Drèze & Hussher, 2003), but for efforts aimed at engaging particular demographics or assessing what content is most useful to those accessing it, considerable challenges to be faced by future research remain.…”

“…Researchers have treated popularity and virality as identical in some studies, in others carefully differentiated them, and in still others operationalized one in terms of the other (Deza & Parikh, 2015;Goel, Anderson, Hofman, & Watts, 2016;Gunthert, 2009;Weng, Menczer, & Ahn, 2013). As one example of the ambiguity around these terms, in Berger et al (2019)-which examines viewer affective evaluations of video content creators, not their popularity or virality-the data set included one British video content creator with 3.1 million views, 375,051 likes, and 6.5 million subscribers and a North American content creator with only 2.1 million views, 192,500 likes, but 23.2 million subscribers (p. 1762). Which of these data in isolation or as some aggregate score might associate with popularity remains wholly obscure.…”

“…Nevertheless, because demographic and presentational aspects of video content creators or presenters can play a role in affective evaluations of YouTube videos (Berger et al, 2019;D. K. Han, 2020;Y.…”

“…Han, Lappas, & Sabnis, 2020), this opens the possibility of increased or decreased affective evaluations when using animated (not live-action) content presentation. For example, Berger et al (2019) found that gender significantly affected view count but not likes (with videos by male creators garnering more views than female creators). Also, the speaking J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f 20 charisma of content creators also significantly affected subscriptions (with North American creators garnering more subscribers than British creators).…”

Análisis de la capacidad de liderazgo y el carisma de los principales youtubers españoles

“…https://doi.org/10.17993/3ctic.2020.93.17-41 "El carisma también juega un papel importante en el éxito de un youtuber" (Berger et al, 2019(Berger et al, : 1761.…”