Open AccessTHE ALGORITHM PLAYGROUND: A CONTENT ANALYSIS OF USER-PRODUCED CHILDREN’S VIDEOS ON YOUTUBE
Author(s) -
Kalia Vogelman-Natan
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
selected papers of internet research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2162-3317
DOI - 10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12071
Subject(s) - surprise , entertainment , storytelling , popularity , computer science , content analysis , multimedia , content creation , social media , variety (cybernetics) , world wide web , psychology , narrative , visual arts , artificial intelligence , sociology , art , social psychology , social science , literature
With early-childhood mobile media device use on the rise, onlinevideo content plays an ever-increasing role in children’s lives. Of the wide variety ofcontent available to children, user-produced videos on YouTube seem to be most popular.However, due to the platform’s size and the overwhelming number of child-targeted videosfound on YouTube, scholars have been struggling with how to approach and study this topic.This study aims to address the gap in research by analyzing prevalent user-producedchildren’s videos on YouTube, with research questions focusing on video genres, theirfeatures, and content themes. Drawing on YouTube’s popularity-measurements and videorecommendation algorithm, a corpus of 100 user-produced videos targeted to children wasassembled. A content analysis of these videos led to the identification andconceptualization of 13 distinct genres of user-produced children’s videos: unboxing,surprise eggs, finger family, play-doh, nursery rhymes, kids songs, learning, pretend play(enactment), pretend play (toys), storytelling, arts & crafts, entertainer in character,and process repetition. Furthermore, the findings indicate that there are often uniqueinterplays between genre type and the content, the production format, and the overallquality and educational rating. In addition to shedding light on the importance of studyingchild-targeted content on YouTube, this study’s main contribution is a typological map ofthe user-produced children’s video ecosystem that future studies from various fields candraw on.