A study of what makes YouTube videos go viral.
Compares the number of likes and dislikes of the video with the most number of views ("most viral") on each date from late 2017 to early 2018. Viral videos tends to have high numbers of likes with few dislikes, proportionally. Some exception to this, though, include Logan Paul's apology video and the 2017 YouTube Rewind.
It makes sense that as a channel gains more subscribers, they get more views on their videos, as evidenced by points near the upper-right of the graph. However, the majority of viral videos seem to be created by channels that are relatively unknown.
Now we'll look at the top YouTube channels to see if famous YouTubers have common features. Grouping YouTube channels by different attributes, we can also get a clearer picture into what makes videos more popular. For instance, grouping by country reveals that the majority of big YouTubers come from the United States, and grouping by category highlights Music as the category with the most YouTube channels.
Our visualizations serve to highlight what makes videos go viral - features including high likes and high number of subscribers. Popular YouTube channels also seem to have common attributes like country of origin (mainly USA) and category of videos. Connecting the two, it's clear to see that it may not be easy to come up with the perfect formula for creating a "viral video," but looking at existing viral videos as a whole there are clear patterns of commonalities.