Clicks for money: Predicting video views through a sentiment analysis of titles and thumbnails

Abstract

Videos dominate online marketing and social media content, and therefore making a video thumbnail highly clickable is a critical yet challenging task. Intense competition among vloggers and channel owners for advertising revenue and sponsorship has led to the increasing use of clickbait-style thumbnails and titles with exaggerated sentiments to boost click-through rates. Drawing on cognitive schema theory, we analyzed the sentiments in video titles, thumbnails, and captions to examine their effects on video views. Our analysis of 16,215 YouTube video covers reveals that strong sentiments in thumbnails, whether positive or negative, lead to more views, whereas strong sentiments in captions have the opposite effect. Video titles with positive rather than negative sentiments generate more views. Sentiment markers such as punctuation, all capitals, and emoticons all contribute to more clicks. These findings highlight that the use of sentiment in video covers can have both a positive and a negative effect, which has significant implications for video marketing.