Youtube Reveals Most Popular Phrase Used To Open Videos; Announce $100 million Fund to Reward Influencers

YouTube have revealed the most popular welcome greeting used by vloggers in opening videos on its platforms.

The Google-owned platform selected videos that had more than 20,000 views, on channels with at least 20,000 subscribers. In addition, it has analysed how creators of different content genres begin their videos.

The study unearthed “Hey guys” as the most used phrase on the video-sharing platform. To obtain this data, the company analysed automatically generated captions on more than a million videos.

Through this discovery, sports videos are more likely to start with “What’s going on?”, while videos of trips begin with “Good morning,” 9% of the time.

“Hey, guys” ranks second in the opening video of technology contents, while “Ladies and Gentlemen” just scrapped first place.

English was not the only language studied by the company. The study highlighted that in Brazil, the most popular greeting on the platform is “Oi gente” (hello guys) and in Mexico “Hello friends” stands out. In France, you will most likely find “Bonjour à tous” or “Hello everyone” more frequently

In conclusion, 36% of youtubers started their videos in 2020 by greeting their viewers with the expression “Hey guys”, highlighting other greetings such as “what’s up” (what’s up?), “Good morning” (good morning) and “All right” (all good).

YouTube’s analysis which focuses on vlogs (a term that comes from the mix of blog and video), reveals that the first words a creator says are key to generating empathy and attracting an audience to watch the video.

Support for short video creators

The video platform announced on Tuesday that it will set aside a $100 million fund to pay content creators who make successful videos on its new short video feature: “Shorts”, at a time when the company seeks to attract more influential users.

The fund will launch in the coming months and will pay creators for this year and in 2022, YouTube said. The investment comes as platforms are competing to attract young creators who are building a huge fan base – and big profit potential – by filming short comedy and dance routines.

The TikTok app started the viral short video trend and was quickly copied by others, such as Instagram’s “Reels” (owned by Facebook), “Spotlight” (from Snapchat) and “Shorts” (from YouTube).

The online video platform said the new fund will pay thousands of creators each month whose videos attract the most viewers in this new short video format. In addition, the company will begin to test the incorporation of advertising in “Shorts”.

As competition in the short video feature market increases, platforms have used creator funds as a way to sweeten the pot and attract more users. TikTok launched a fund for creators in July and subsequently increased its funding to $1 billion in the United States within three years. Snapchat distributes $1 million a day to users who post featured content on Spotlight.