Researchers need to make more use of YouTube
Professional experts and research institutions need to make greater use of video platforms like YouTube to inform people about their work. At the moment, scientific video discourse on the web is mainly dominated by laypeople. Professionals are therefore urged to engage more with YouTube's recipes for success in order to reach a mass audience, as a study by the University of Trier shows.
"A new and wide-reaching communication space with new players for science topics has emerged on the Internet. For science, this transformation is both a challenge and an opportunity, in that it creates competition with non-scientific communicators, but also new communication opportunities," says study director Hans-Jürgen Bucher.
The researchers analyzed the popularity of 400 German-language science videos on YouTube. Of these, 214 came from laypeople and 186 from professional experts. The 50 most popular videos included content produced exclusively by non-scientists. The amateurs were able to collect up to 500,000 views in a few weeks, while videos from research institutions reached no more than a few thousand viewers.
"Adjusting to media logic"
Two important success factors for scientific YouTube videos emerged in the study. The first factor is interactivity. Lay people often build a social network through their content and let their viewers actively participate in the discourse. The second recipe for success is a creative choice of video type. Animations in particular reach the most people with up to 140,000 views.
Professional science videos usually only show researchers talking about their work in front of the camera. However, this arouses little interest. "Established research institutions can only catch up in terms of publicity if they adapt to the media logic of YouTube and, for example, also rely on typical formats such as animated film and presentation film," advises Bucher. (pte)
