Abstract
Online video services, messaging systems, games and social media services are tremendously popular among young people and children in many countries. Most of the digital services offered on the internet are advertising funded, which makes advertising ubiquitous in children’s everyday life. To understand the impact of advertising-based digital services on children, we study the collective behavior of users of YouTube for kids channels and present the demographics of a large number of users. We collected data from 12,848 videos from 17 channels in US and UK and 24 channels in Brazil. The channels in English have been viewed more than 37 billion times. We also collected more than 14 million comments made by users. Based on a combination of text-analysis and face recognition tools, we show the presence of racial and gender biases in our large sample of users. We also identify children actively using YouTube, although the minimum age for using the service is 13 years in most countries. We provide comparisons of user behavior among the three countries, which represent large user populations in the global North and the global South.
C.S. Araújo and G. Magno—These authors contributed equally to this work.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partially supported by CNPq, CAPES, FAPEMIG, and the projects InWeb, MASWEB, and INCT-Cyber.
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Appendices
A Appendix 1
Comments and Likes X Video Duration.
Demographics of audience by channel
B Appendix 2 - Semantics
In this analysis we want to measure how the video was evaluated by the viewers. We use the text of the comments as a proxy for the perception of the audience, looking into the semantics it contains. We focus on only two categories of LIWC: Positive Emotions and Negative Emotions. Since the LIWC is available only for the English language, we inspect only comments from the U.S. channels.
Figure 11 (Appendix) presents the percentage of the comments that contain words related to positive emotions or negative emotions, according to LIWC. We aggregate the comments by channel, video category, gender and age group. The predominance of positive emotions is notorious, indicating that the videos are, in general, well evaluated by the public. Interestingly, some channels have a higher proportion of positive words than others, such as US+UK_11 and US+UK_9. Regarding the video categories, we observe that videos with make up are more positive than the others. Looking into the social groups, there are no huge differences, although we observe an indication that the use of positive words seems to decrease as the audience get older.
Percentage of comments containing words of positive and negative emotion
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Araújo, C.S., Magno, G., Meira, W., Almeida, V., Hartung, P., Doneda, D. (2017). Characterizing Videos, Audience and Advertising in Youtube Channels for Kids. In: Ciampaglia, G., Mashhadi, A., Yasseri, T. (eds) Social Informatics. SocInfo 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10539. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67217-5_21
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