YouTube como objeto de investigación en la comunicación

Abstract

The YouTube Internet portal has more than 2000 million users and preferably comes from mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. The need to obtain public opinion on diverse topics is widespread in the social sciences and in communication. Traditional methods based on surveys and interviews or discussion groups are being replaced in part by the extraction of data from the Internet. The potential as a YouTube research tool is little known. This book chapter investigates this problem by introducing and critically evaluating a systematic strategy of information gathering and analysis on YouTube. We offer the knowledge of various free programs and websites that facilitate the extraction of data from YouTube without using programming codes, data mining or other tools outside the common competencies of the communicator. The results of these communication research on YouTube show that it is possible to identify patterns of audiovisual consumption on different topics.