What makes a popular science video on YouTube

This article by Dustin Welbourne and Will J Grant in The Conversation discusses ways to make a video about science popular and effective in its communication, highlighting a number of key features that are demonstrated through embedded examples.

Extract

"Hundreds of hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and hundreds of millions of hours are viewed daily, including many that cover areas of science. Despite this, if you want to use YouTube for science communication, reaching an audience is not always guaranteed.

We’ve analysed nearly 400 science communication videos to understand what the successful YouTube science communicators do – those with numerous subscribers – that less successful communicators do not.

So, here are seven things we found that can help you to communicate science on YouTube."

Contents

1. Choose your audience

2. Deliver in style

3. Stay focused

4. Get to the point

5. Be part of the community

6. Give the audience an anchor

7. Be a person not a company

Sources

Welbourne, D. and Grant, W. J. (2015). 'What makes a popular science video on YouTube?' in The Conversation [Website]. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/what-makes-a-popular-science-video-on-youtube-36657

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