A recent study conducted by the Pew Research Center delves deep into some of YouTube's most popular channels and uncovers intriguing findings.
According to the study, YouTube videos featuring keywords like "Fortnite" or "prank" in their titles received over five times as many median views compared to videos without these keywords.
Among these keywords, videos mentioning the video game "Fortnite" witnessed the most significant boost in views. Remarkably, 15 percent of all video game uploads from the prominent YouTube channels in the study featured the word "Fortnite" in their titles.
Other popular video titles included those related to video game series such as FIFA, Roblox, and PUBG. Gaming videos incorporating terms like "moment" and "funny" in their titles also outperformed the average.
The study revealed that, in general, video game-related content, videos targeting children, and videos featuring children under 13 years old garnered more views on average compared to other types of content on YouTube.
Additionally, video titles featuring keywords such as "ASMR," "challenge," "superhero," and "box" showed an increase in view count. Challenges popular on YouTube, like the cinnamon challenge, and product unboxing videos, are synonymous with the platform, making it reasonable that videos with these keywords in their titles performed well.
Beauty videos that included "makeup" in their titles received more views than other beauty-related content. Incorporating words like "DIY" or "easy" in how-to videos also resulted in more views. Children's content featuring keywords like "slime" or "rainbow" exhibited higher view counts.
Using attention-grabbing clickbait terms such as "ultimate," "insane," and "worst" also led to more views.
News-related YouTube content with keywords like "Trump" or "president" surpassed other current events and politics videos. The study found that 36 percent of the videos posted by popular channels in this category featured at least one of these two words in their video titles.
Pew examined a total of 43,770 popular YouTube channels that had amassed at least 250,000 subscribers by the end of 2018 for its study. The YouTube channels analyzed for the study posted nearly a quarter of a million videos in the first week of 2019, with the average video lasting about 12 minutes.
Overall, this amounted to 48,486 hours of YouTube content viewed more than 14.2 billion times during the first seven days of posting.