Sharing YouTube content in offline mode: an attempt to explore conversation through an experimental study

Abstract

Various researches have added up productive insights on user's motivation and psychology behind online video sharing. Given that sharing involves communication and other related factors, this study aims to investigate the user's communication needs and personality traits working behind sharing online videos in an offline platform. Given the popularity, YouTube was chosen for investigating the above research objective. With a differential approach, this study has employed social network analysis to understand the communication diffusion through quasi-experiment methodology. Three video genres-blocks; movie review videos, sports videos and music videos were chosen to understand the difference among the network structures. Further, personality of test units (five-factor model) and their communication factors (expertise, trustworthiness, attractiveness, social tie and homophily) are keyed out through the measures of eigenvector centrality, betweenness centrality and closeness centrality from the three network structures. The results indicated that the central units of movie reviews and music videos exhibited an extrovert personality; on the other hand, the central units from sports videos displayed an openness trait. Alongside the results of personality, it was understood that social tie, homophily and trustworthiness happen to be the most influencing factors in the communication diffusion of movie reviews, sports and music videos respectively.