Madhu Viswanathan is an Associate Professor, Marketing and Research Director - IIDS at Indian School of Business His detailed profile can be found HERE.
Indian School of Business
February 06, 2025
Visual Stimulus as a Driver of Popularity of Childrens’ Videos
Videos on social sharing platforms such as YouTube Kids have become an essential part of children’s lives. Excessive viewing of videos has led to growing concerns about its negative consequences on children, such as addiction behaviours. It is therefore imperative to understand the drivers behind the popularity of children’s videos. However, aspects considered as important for the popularity of adults’ videos, such as social sharing, are not pertinent while examining children’s videos. We answer this important question by examining the relationship between video content characteristics and video views by extracting various content characteristics from 33,964 YouTube videos posted on the top children’s channels. Central to our investigation is the concept of visual stimulus, quantified here through “optical flow” measurements, which we posit as a key factor influencing children’s engagement with video content. Our analysis reveals that higher optical flow relates to higher YouTube video views, even when controlling for the video age and other channel-specific characteristics. Moreover, to ascertain causality, we designed and executed experimental ad campaigns on YouTube using the Google experiment setup, provided by Google to determine which video ad is more effective on YouTube. We manipulate optical flow by changing the speed of a repeating video {Slow(0.5x), Normal(1x), Fast(1.5x), Super-fast(2x)} and the target channels {Children x Grownups}. Remarkably, showing video ads with higher optical flow (speed 2x with approximately twice the magnitude of optical flow) results in 8.6% higher viewership of video ads placed on the top 100 children’s channels. Our experiments confirm that videos with higher optical flow get more views on children’s channels. Additionally, we find that the effect of optical flow only holds for children’s channels but not for grownups. Our findings have important implications for content creators, video hosting platforms, parents, educators, policymakers, and society.
Key words: Visual stimulus, YouTube, Video views, Google ads, Children, Optical flow
