A Good Story Well Told: Storytelling Components That Impact Science Video Popularity on YouTube

Abstract

Storytelling plays a crucial role in science communication, but little research has investigated how it impacts the popularity of science videos. This study examined storytelling components in 306 popular YouTube science videos and revealed significant relationships between video popularity and five storytelling components, namely dramatic question, insight, moments of change, emotional arousal and, status of story. Emotional arousal, in particular, showed a strong association with popularity. The results shed light on the role of storytelling in increasing science video popularity.

How prominent science communicators on YouTube understand the impact of their work

“…Success in science communication is difficult to define, and may vary widely from project to project and from communicator to communicator. Given that video metrics have been analyzed as an indicator of popularity (Welbourne and Grant, 2016;Huang and Grant, 2020), it was surprising that many creators diverged from defining success in terms of view count or engagement rates. In fact, many used personal enjoyment as a measure of a successful video: "Main metric I use is.…”

Interactions between emotional and cognitive engagement with science on YouTube

“…On social media, emotional engagement is mostly inferred from comment text through computational techniques such as sentiment analysis (Mohammad, 2016) that typically identify the components and intensity of emotional arousal discussed above (Huang and Grant, 2020). In these techniques, a lexicon for a set of possible emotions (e.g.…”

Testing how different narrative perspectives achieve communication objectives and goals in online natural science videos

“…Correspondingly, these video-focused platforms have increasingly become recognized and evaluated as popular media for effective science communication [ 21 , 24 – 26 ]. Many studies of this type of media assess characteristics of successful YouTube content by evaluating previously published videos from established and popular channels (e.g., [ 5 , 7 , 27 ]). While a few recent studies have included comparisons of videos presented by scientists versus science YouTube presenters [ 28 , 29 ], controlled experiments that are designed to test the effectiveness of scientists-as-presenters telling first-person narratives in online video compared to other narrative perspectives have yet to be done.…”

“…Traditional science journalism has been decreasing in recent decades, becoming increasingly overtaken by online media outlets [ 2 , 3 ]. Blogs, webpages, and social media however have seen a surge and the science stories presented there can be told by many individuals, from interested non-scientists, spokespeople with science backgrounds talking about the work of others, to the scientists themselves (e.g., [ 3 – 5 , 7 , 25 ]). The shift from traditional to non-traditional sources for science news also comes with a shift from a one-way dialogue towards two-way engagement providing greater access to the content producers themselves.…”

“…In fact, audience engagement indicators such as likes and comments have been shown to correlate with popularity of science content [ 6 ]. These and other analyses of YouTube content often focus on the most popular videos and channels which are overwhelmingly produced by professional content creators, not by scientists who are self-sharing their work (e.g., [ 5 ]). In fact, there are few active researchers who maintain presences on YouTube, which likely stems from the time investment it demands and a correspondingly perceived lack of institutional and collegial support [ 39 ].…”