COVID-19: Metric analysis of videos and communication channels on youtube

Abstract

The objective of this work is to determine the volume of videos on Covid-19 published and disseminated through You-Tube, and directly or indirectly related to the Spanish national territory, to characterize the impact of those videos (in terms of views, likes and comments received), and finally to categorize the channels through which the videos have been broadcast. For this, 39,531 videos published between January 1 and April 30, 2020 have been analysed. The results show that the number of videos on Covid-19 grew since the establishment of the state of alarm in Spain, and they have been slightly decreasing over time, including certain upswings linked to political decisions. The videos achieve on average high volumes of views, likes/dislikes and comments, and have been published mainly by the media. The videos related both to Blogs and Entertainment are very numerous but with less impact. The videos belonging to the categories of Education and Science and Technology are less numerous, but had a high impact, especially in view counts. In addition, it is conclu-ded that YouTube search filters are not accurate enough to be used in informetric studies without a high data cleansing workload. Likewise, the existence of channels applying defective positioning techniques makes it difficult to carry out this type of study.