Whatnewssparksinterest AM Sharedon RG

This article has been accepted for publication in Online Information Review, published by
Emerald. Available at: https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/OIR-01-2022-

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Cite this paper as : Deori, M., Kumar, V. and Verma, M.K. (2022), "What news sparks interest on
YouTube? A study of news content uploaded by India's top five Hindi news networks", Online
Information Review, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-01-2022-
0007
What news sparks interest on YouTube? A study of news content uploaded by

India's top five Hindi news networks
Maya Deori
Department of Library and Information Science, Mizoram University, Aizawl, India
Vinit Kumar*
Department of Library and Information Science,
Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University, Lucknow, India, and
Manoj Kumar Verma
Department of Library and Information Science, Mizoram University, Aizawl, India
*Corresponding Author: mailvinitkumar@gmail.com
Abstract
Purpose: The consumption of news from social media is the new trend, still News channels
are the authentic source to transmit relevant news to audiences. Social media has gradually
left an impact on the audience but the news channels have upgraded and providing various
news services online on social media websites. The present study aims to study the type of
news videos uploaded by the top five Hindi TV news channels on their YouTube channels
with an aim to see which type of videos spark interest for YouTube viewers.
Design/methodology/approach: By applying the techniques of content analysis, sentiment
analysis and text mining the study aims to measure the average sentiments, top words and the
trend of selected popular terms in the comments on uploaded news videos by the top five
Hindi news channels over a period of one year.
Findings: Results of the study indicate that the news channels are uploading more news
videos about crime and investigation, politics, health, and protests while uploading fewer
news videos covering travel, science and technology, and religion. While the viewers of the
participating news channels are more interested in giving their thoughts or opinions in the
form of comments on news videos concerning crime, politics, protests, and health, or that
these videos inspire conversation on YouTube.
Originality: The study's distinctiveness resides in the approach utilised to collect data and
analyse the results to better understand the online behaviour of news channel audiences.
Research implications: The findings might be of interest to content managers of news
channels to understand the interest of their audience.
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Keyword: Sentiment analysis; Opinion mining; YouTube; Web 2.0; Mozdeh; News
Channels; social media; Audiences.
Introduction
Media is considered the fourth pillar of a democratic country. The news channels contribute
to the development of a transparent society by presenting information from across the world
in a captivating manner by sensationalising with images and video clips. Mass media helps
the audiences to communicate and broadcast information outlets with the help of technologies
such as apps, television and radio programmes in video, audio, image or multimedia format.
Mass communication eventually strengthens society by transmitting information to make
informed decisions through radio broadcasts, social media, films, newspapers, news channels.
In comparison to television and print media, there has been a rising tendency of news
consumption through online media. Nevertheless, social media sites in general, and notably
interactional platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in particular, are becoming a
more important source of news (Welbers and Opgenhaffen, 2018). The shift of consumers
may be regarded to various factors such as integration with everyday activities, accessibility,
availability of mobile devices and features of interactivity available on this media (Meijer and
Kormelink, 2014). The two-way interactivity provides consumers with an opportunity to read
and know about the other aspects and views of other news consumers revolving around the
news to form their opinion or make decisions on the other hand they can also express their
views as well. The shift of consumers to online media caused the traditional media channels,
such as radio channels, television networks and newspapers to set their presence on online
media. The majority of today's news, including that distributed via social media and
aggregators, is still produced by established news media organisations (Domingo, Masip and
Costera, 2015). The majority of news organisations have an online presence in the form of a
website and accounts on social networking sites. To reach their audience and attract revenue,
television news networks began uploading their video material to video sharing websites such
as YouTube. This approach has been met with approval from news consumers, as news
channels are still considered to be the authentic source to transmit relevant news to audiences.
The first news service in India was broadcast on television in 1959, the Hindi news channels
are the most popular regional language news networks in India. AajTak, ABP News, India
TV, NDTV India, and Republic Bharat are the most popular Hindi TV news channels, all of
which have their own YouTube channel too. The oldest private Hindi news channel (NDTV
India, founded in 1988) to the newly founded Hindi news channel (Republic Bharat in 2017)
are all represented among these Hindi news channels.
The development of technology has radically altered the way people live in everyday life
activities ranging from education, entertainment, communication, and information
transmission. Certain web 2.0 apps, such as YouTube, Facebook have attained widespread
appeal and dynamic dominance in everyday lives. YouTube (www.youtube.com) a web-
based video-sharing platform that fosters a community that values four fundamental
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freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of opportunity, and freedom

of belonging to content producers and viewers. Users can like and dislike videos on
YouTube, and popular content receives acknowledgment when it hits a certain amount of
views. YouTube can be utilised to assist determine the influence of a service or product by
examining and analysing the feelings expressed in the comments. As a result, evaluating and
analysing the product's sentiments has become much more significant. Sentiment analysis is
an opinion mining method or methodology that identifies positive and negative attitudes
about a product using statistical, machine learning, and natural language processing
techniques and tools (Pak and Paroubek, 2010). Earlier in the 1950s, sentiment analysis was
carried out by conducting specialised interviews, distributing questionnaires, and conducting
surveys, but now it has unique applications and ways to evaluate the importance by extracting
definite data from the viewers’ comments posted online. Evaluating sentiments aid in making
informed decisions, determining industrial dominance, brand monitoring, detecting industry
trends, brand monitoring, commodity evaluation, and consumer services. YouTube has a
significant engagement in this, delivering a wide range of services and information.
The present study aims to study the type of news videos uploaded by the top five Hindi TV
news channels on their YouTube channels with an aim to see which type of videos spark
interest for YouTube viewers. By applying the techniques of sentiment analysis and text
mining the study aims to measure the average sentiments, top words and the trend of selected
popular terms in the comments on uploaded news videos by the top five Hindi news channels
over a period of one year.
Literature Review
With the presence of the internet, traditional mass media communication has experienced a
new route and dimension of media conveyance. As a result, the news industry has been
concentrating on improving conventional journalism abilities, digital journalism skills, and
Web-coding skills in order to include online news operations with the involvement of web
2.0 tools and social media (Fahmy, 2008). The use of social media tools in the news
mainstream industry has radically altered the ways in which current events are transmitted to
audiences. Mukherjee (2016) analyses journalists' perceptions on the impact of social media
on news industry and their operational process and highlighted that social media news is very
convenient mode of news transmission for the young generation to keep up with current
events and gain information in a short amount of time. Newman, Dutton and Blank (2012)
studied the altering ecology of news through social media in Britain and stated that the
enhancement of communicative power is being practiced frequently in both news production
and consumption. Also stating that news carriers must practice more rigorous investigation
into journalistic methods for sustaining global networks. Hrckova et al. (2021) analysed
reliability of the news links by the partisan news media using hyperlink network analysis of
partisan and mainstream media. The result highlights that the links are highly reliable yet the
outgoing links are less reliable when compared to incoming links from the mainstream media.
Edgerly et al. (2020) conducted an online experiment to determine if the public is supposed to
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accept the news headlines or verify their authenticity or truthfulness. The finding
demonstrates that viewers are more likely to verify the headline if they assume it is real.
Since the rigorous usage of online/social media news information appears to be ingrained in
society, the issue of news data authenticity and credibility arises indicating the need to
evaluate the news contents and sentiments of the viewers. Sentiment analysis is a method for
determining whether public sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral regarding any product,
services or events. Several studies have been published that demonstrate the use of sentiment
analysis on social media material to explore intents, video qualities, and future research
possibilities. Deori, Kumar and Verma (2021) analysed the sentiment study of the comments
on the videos on Koha and DSpace software on YouTube using paralleldots API and
evaluated the sentiment differentiating in both English language and multilingual format. The
content of the paper reveals the characteristics of the videos extracted and the intention of the
comments referring to the end-users to adopt the use of correct and relevant information.
Adwan et al. (2020) reviewed the sentiment study of the comments on Twitter through
various algorithms and demonstrated a direction for future research on cognitive science,
semantic web, big data and visualization using sentiment analysis. Novendri et al. (2020)
evaluated the sentiments of the comments on the Netflix series Money Heist applying Naïve
Bayes algorithm, where the fourth season was found to be in high demand by the viewers
mostly with negative sentiments. Akhtar (2019) represents the techniques to analyse the
sentiments of the comments posted on the YouTube video Liverpool FC- The road to
Madrid- UCL2019 through TextBlob. The study also highlights the limitations of sentiment
dictionaries and polarity scores provided to unrelated comments. Kumar and Gaur (2019)
highlight a qualitative approach on the contents of the Hindi and English news channels
where the discussions have been made on the obstacles like news consumption pattern
change via the internet, commercial break frequency, time and place flexibility and adoption
of mobile. Parabhoi (2019) analysed the sentiments of tweets from Twitter of ten university
libraries ranked in World university ranking 2019 using Mozdeh and reported that the
Bodleian Library of Oxford University library is high on positive sentiments and Exhibition
and Archive are revealed to have top word frequency. Shah et al. (2019) used a dictionary-
based sentiment analysis technique to detect the variation of Twitter posts among 100 cities
with the time frame of July 13th to November 30th, 2017 identifying the positive sentiments
and negative sentiments by comparing the time, location and social interactions on Twitter.
Thelwall (2018a) introduced the Webometric Analyst and Mozdeh software to detect and
analyse the details and sentiments of the comments posted on YouTube videos through the
Comment Term Frequency Comparison (CTFC) method which detects the average
sentiments, gender distribution, networks of relationships between queries through
illustrations. Tanesab, Sembiring and Purnomo (2017) mine the text posted by the user of
YouTube on the character Ahok as a governor using Support Vector Machine within the
time-bound of 2015 to 2016. The Lexicon based method and Confusion Matrix helped in
determining the percentage of the class of sentiments of the 1000 recorded sample data.
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Thelwall (2014) executed the analysis of the opinions of a Twitter corpus linked to the U.K.
riots in 2011 using Mozdeh.
Kumar et al. (2018) analyzes the opinions and reaction attained by the audiences for news
circulation in the social media platform i.e., Facebook and compared it with television, radio
and print medium and reported that the user sentiments correlate strongly with the sentiments
of the news and source of the news. Khoo, Nourbakhsh, and Na (2012) evaluates the
linguistic framework for automatic sentiment analysis of text called appraisal theory. The
result detects the difficulty in identifying appraisal phrases and attitude mainly in political
news to identify various behaviors, timeframes and typology. This study has also
demonstrated the use of the theory with certain future directions for research. Shapiro,
Sudhof, and Wilson (2022) analyze sentiment analysis tools using a sample of newspaper
articles that scored high positivity/negativity scale by readers, and also provided a sentiment
scoring-model that was shown to be more accurate than current tools. Sufi (2022) analyze the
impacts of negative news or breaking news using sentiment analysis, entity detection and
automated regression analysis capturing the 22,425 global news from 192 countries resulting
to have more accurate logistic regression and linear regression in AUC and MAPE
through smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Luo and Mu (2022) evaluated the sentiments
regarding the news on the 45th President of the United States to check the accuracy of
Negative Sentiment Smoothing Model (NSSM) creating three evaluation metrics: Euclidean
distance, accuracy, and precision. The model proves to give competent sentiments
minimizing errors rates to be further applied in information systems. Maisal et al. (2019)
assess the opinions found in the news channels discussed in the form of news talk shows and
interviews on YouTube regarding the Indonesian government’s plan to move the capital city.
The result induced that the opinions of the public were positive and supportive towards the
step of government.
The literature search demonstrated that several studies were undertaken on the analysis of
sentiment of the comments or opinions posted on YouTube, Twitter or any other social
networks in many other fields using various techniques and software such as Naïve Bayes
algorithm, SentiWordNet, SenTube (Uryupina et.al. 2014), Support Vector Machine (SVM),
Mozdeh and many more considering it as a predominant research area. The literature also
presents different models undertaken to evaluate the sentiments of the news contents inducing
the credibility, accuracy and the opinions of the viewers. However, it is seen that no studies
have been undertaken evaluating the contents provided by news channels and assess the
sentiments, interest and satisfaction rate of the audiences. Therefore, the present study aims to
know the opinions or sentiments of the audiences about the five undertaken Hindi news
channels on YouTube and identify the topics of interest for the viewers of those news
channels by evaluating the sentiments and characteristic features of news content.
Research Questions
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RQ1: What type of videos are uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks on their
YouTube Channels?
RQ2: What kind of interest is shown by viewers in the form of the number of comments on
the videos uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks?
RQ3: What is the growth trend of the comments posted on the undertaken Hindi news
channels on YouTube?
RQ4: What type of news videos uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks attract more
comments?
RQ5: What level of average sentiments are expressed by the viewers in the comments on the
videos uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks?
RQ6: What level of average sentiments were expressed by viewers for the different types of
videos uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks?
RQ7: What are the top words used by commenters for each undertaken Hindi news channel?
RQ8: How the selected popular terms have appeared in the comments on the videos uploaded
by the top five Hindi news networks over the study period?
Method
The present study is confined to focus on the audience comments posted on the videos
uploaded on YouTube by the top five Hindi Indian TV news channels that include AajTak,
ABP News, India TV, NDTV India and Republic Bharat. The five Hindi news channels were
selected based on their language, popularity, and Television Rating Point(TRP) as listed in
India's data insights published by the Broadcast Audience Research Council(BARC)
(https://www.barcindia.co.in/data-insights). The study evaluates the characteristics of videos
and the sentiments expressed in the comments posted on video content uploaded by these top
five Hindi news channels on YouTube for the period from March 2020 to March 2021.
The Mozdeh Big Data Text Analysis software was used to collect data from YouTube, the
Mozdeh which is a sub verge of Webometric Analyst software (Thelwall, 2018b) released by
the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of
Wolverhampton(http://mozdeh.wlv.ac.uk/). It implements YouTube API v3 to fetch data
from YouTube. In the first step, the YouTube channel IDs of the selected top five Hindi TV
channels were collected from the websites of the respective news channels and verified from
the YouTube website. The collected channel IDs were fed to Mozdeh to extract the videos
uploaded on these channels. The use of channel Id confirms that the videos of the concerned
YouTube channel are only queried, although the software supports extraction of large scale
data through a variety of queries such as keywords, video Ids and Channel Ids. To limit the
time the ‘Earliest date’ feature was used to select videos for the selected period. A total of
2230 YouTube videos with 17,10,049 comments were extracted altogether creating a
different project for each of the undertaken news channels.
For sentiment analysis and trends of popular terms, the analysis was done using the Mozdeh
Big Data Text Analysis software which is a free tool for analysing the sentiment posted on
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social media or mini-blogs such as Twitter, YouTube and Reddit. Mozdeh implements the
SentiStrength algorithm to predict the strength of the sentiment expressed in the text. The
SentiStrength method is a lexicon-based sentiment analysis technique that uses a list of words
that are commonly used in a positive or negative context to determine sentiment. It further
applies twelve additional rules to determine the polarity and strength of the analysed text as a
measure of sentiment (Thelwall, Buckley, and Paltoglou, 2012).
Dataset
The study is based on the top five Indian Hindi TV news channels, the selected channels have
a number of subscribers ranging from 7.36 million to 48.4 million which shows a high level
of acceptance and popularity of these news channels among the registered users on YouTube.
The oldest news channel presence on YouTube in the selected channels is IndiaTV joined in
2006 and the latest joined news channel is Republic Bharat joined in 2019. It shows that the
dataset contained channels of age ranging from 02 years to 15 years on YouTube (Table 1).
[Table 1: Characteristics of selected news channels]
Results
Growth trend of uploaded videos and comments
Table 2 shows the month-wise distribution of videos and extracted comments for each
channel collected in the sample for investigation in the time frame of one year (from March
2020 to March 2021). It can be seen that the dataset contains maximum videos from the
Republic Bharat channel with 583 videos (26% of the sample) and ABP news with 313
videos (14% of the sample). In the case of comments, the Republic Bharat received the
maximum 955910 (55.89% of the sample) viewer comments while IndiaTV received 84580
(4.0% of the sample) viewer comments the minimum of the selected channels. 75% of the
channels have more than 9192 monthly comments with a maximum 117700 monthly
comments. All the channels have a minimum of 477 monthly comments and a maximum of
294688 monthly comments. The minimum median monthly comments received by India TV
(5422 comments) while NDTV received 32282 median monthly comments during the
selected time span of the study. Although seeing the monthly average, the Republic Bharat
received average 73531.53 comments while ABP News received 6903.69 average comments.
The growth trend distribution of comments highlights that although the Republic Bharat is
the youngest channel in terms of joining YouTube it is the most popular news channel in
terms of the number of comments and uploaded videos.
[Table 2: Growth trend of the videos and comments for each news channel]
[Figure 1: Graph of average comments extracted per news channel]

Figure 1 depicts a line chart of month-wise growth of the number of comments received on
the videos uploaded by the selected news channels. The videos have received comments most
comments in the month of August 2020 (347793 comments; 20.34 %) where the comments
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received from Republic Bharat has made a significant contribution, followed by September
2020 (272582 comments; 15.94 %) and October 2020 (230367 comments; 13.47 %).
According to the month-by-month breakdown, March 2020 (33533 comments; 1.96 %) and
April 2020 (46523 comments; 2.72 %) have the fewest comments. The variation shows that
the interest in the suicide case of Sushant Singh Rajput peaked in August 2020, and fans were
highly interested to learn the real cause for such a significant move taken by a Bollywood
actor, and the news channel Republic Bharat was covering the story extensively hence
received maximum interaction on its YouTube channel.
Types of uploaded videos
A list of categories was selected from the categories available on the Newsmaker website
(https://www.newsmaker.com.au/category/index). Newsmaker is a press release distribution
service that sends published news content to news services and categorizes them into
numerous categories to which individual journalists or news service providers can subscribe.
Eleven categories that are relevant to Indian social and geographical situations were chosen
(see Table 3). The title, description, and content of each video uploaded to the YouTube
channel of five selected Hindi news channels were used to categories them in the eleven
selected categories.
[Table 3: No. of videos associated with the category distribution]
Table 3 reveals that throughout the study period, the selected Indian Hindi news channels
posted the most video news content in the category of "Crime & Investigation" (29.60 %),
followed by "Political" (24.08%), "Health & Accidents" (12.65%), and “Protest” (11.26%). A
few videos were also posted under the categories "Travel" (1.35%), "Science & Technology"
(2.25%), and "Religion" (2.38%). When looking at the top three categories for videos
uploaded by individual news channels, the "Crime & Investigation" and "Political" categories
were in the top three for all five news channels, while the "Health & Accidents" category was
in the top three for two news channels, ABP News and IndiaTV. Only NDTV India had the
"Protest" category in the top three, while Aaj Tak had the "Bulletin News" category in the top
three, and Republic Bharat had the "Achievements" category in the top three, along with
"Political" and "Crime & Investigation" categories. It may be deduced that news channels are
uploading more news videos about crime and investigation, politics, health, and protests
while uploading fewer news videos covering travel, science and technology, and religion.
Category-wise distribution of the comments
Table 4 demonstrates the number of comments posted per category on the videos uploaded by
the undertaken Hindi news channels. When compared to other categories, the "Crime &
Investigation" category has the most comments (724,691 comments, or 42.38%), followed by
Political (410,032 comments, or 23.98%), Protest (178,363 comments, or 10.43%), and
Health & Accidents (119,639 comments, or 7.00%). In the most popular category, the Crime
& Investigation category, Republic Bharat (516,340 comments) and NDTV India (126,285
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comments) have received the most comments, while ABP News (19,552 comments) has
received the fewest. The next most popular category is Political (410,032), with Republic
Bharat (231,478 comments), NDTV India (117,828 comments), and AajTak (29,299
comments) having the most share of comments. The next most popular category is Protest,
with the highest comments for NDTV India (128,743 comments) followed by Republic
Bharat (28,276 comments) and India TV (8,272 comments). It is possible to conclude that
viewers of participating news channels are more interested in giving their thoughts on news
videos concerning crime, politics, protests, and health, or that these videos inspire
conversation on YouTube.
[Table 4: Category-wise distribution of the comments]
Sentiment analysis
The SentiStrength method is used by the Mozdeh programme to analyse the sentiment of a
given text and determine the sentiment score. On our dataset of 1710049 comments, we used
the sentiment analysis feature of the software to get the average sentiments for each channel.
Table 5 shows the findings of the sentiment analysis of viewer comments on the videos that
were posted, as well as the average sentiments of each news channel that was investigated. It
can be observed that the audience of the two news channels i.e. NDTV India (0.0185) and
Republic Bharat (0.0533) on average posted comments with positive sentiments about the
news videos posted on YouTube while the other three news channels i.e. AajTak(-0.0085),
ABP News(-0.0356) and India TV(-0.0132) received comments with on average negative
sentiments posted by audiences on YouTube.
[Table 5: Results of sentiment analysis]
Table 5 depicts the gender distribution of comments on YouTube, as well as the average
sentiments of each selected Hindi news channel. In accordance with the gender distribution, it
is observed that comments from the female category outnumber those from the male category
in all of the studied news channels, with the exception of NDTV India, which has a bigger
number of comments than the female category. When compared to both the male and female
categories, the none category receives the most comments. None indicates that the software is
unable to determine the gender of the commenter or that the commenter has not stated his or
her gender.
The table also indicates that Aaj Tak, ABP News and India TV received comments with
average negative sentiments for each of the gender categories while NDTV India and
Republic Bharat received comments with average positive sentiments for all the three
categories i.e. male, female and none.
Category-wise analysis of average sentiment
To answer the research question as to what level of average sentiments were expressed by
viewers for the different types of videos uploaded by the top five Hindi news networks. The
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comments data classified as per the eleven selected categories were fed to Mozdeh by
creating a project for each category. In the software, the manually extracted video Ids for
each category were entered as a query using the Import data technique. Through this process,
the requisite data or comments were being extracted and the software automatically revealed
the average sentiment for each selected category. The results of the category wise sentiment
analysis are presented in Table 6. The table displays the average positive, average negative
and average positive minus average negative sentiment score for each category.
The average sentiments of the comments for categories, Achievement (0.2291), Bulletin
News (0.0672), Crime & Investigation (0.0125), Economy (0.1501), Entertainment (0.1226),
Political (0.0978), Protest (0.1193) and Religion (0.0463) were found to be positive while for
the categories Health & Accidents, and Science & Technology shows average negative
sentiments with (-0.0047) and (-0.046) respectively. Like the term itself, the category
Achievement has received the most positive sentiments from the audiences in the form of
comments in YouTube posted news videos which are followed by the category Economy,
Entertainment and Protest. This shows that the viewers of this particular category are quite
pleased and satisfied with the content that is being uploaded by the news channels. However,
the viewers of the category Health & Accidents and Science and Technology are dissatisfied
and annoyed by the contents that are displayed in the news videos.
The results of the category-wise sentiment analysis indicate that, Achievement (0.2291),
Bulletin News (0.0672), Crime & Investigation (0.0125), Economy (0.1501), Entertainment
(0.1226), Political (0.0978), Protest (0.1193), and Religion (0.0463) all had received
comments with positive average sentiments, whereas Health & Accidents (-0.0047) and
Science & Technology (-0.046) received comments with average negative sentiments. The
category Achievement, like the term itself, has elicited the most favourable reactions from
viewers in the form of comments on YouTube news videos, followed by the categories
Economy, Entertainment, and Protest. This demonstrates that news channel viewers in this
category are pleased and satisfied with the content that is being broadcast. Viewers in the
categories Health & Accidents and Science and Technology, on the other hand, are unhappy
and annoyed by the substance of the news videos.
[Table 6: Average Sentiment of the category]
Top-terms and time series analysis of contents of comments
We calculated the word frequency of comments to have a better understanding of the type of
discussion on Hindi news channels' uploaded videos. The term "word frequency" refers to a
list of terms extracted from a body of text and sorted and ranked according to the frequency
with which the term appears in the text. Figure 2 visualises the top terms used in the
comments posted in response to the videos uploaded for each of the selected news channels
in the form of a word cloud. The software Mozdeh generated the ranked top terms with their
number of occurrences. The irrelevant words like ‘the’, ‘that’, ‘an’, ‘for’, ‘of’, ‘and’, ‘etc.’
are eliminated from the text. Choosing the top 30 keywords for the display of the trend of the
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viewers’ views we used the site WordCloud (https://www.wordclouds.com/) inputting the

extracted text file of top terms with their number of reoccurrences. WordCloud.com is a free
website and word cloud generator that displays the frequency of a word by importing a text
file containing the word and counting the number of occurrences, or by directly entering the
words and numbers into the site.
[Figure 2: Word frequency distribution of the Hindi News Channels]
Figure 3 depicts a word cloud with five regions, one for each news channel. The top words
for Aaj Tak and ABP News are ‘Modi’ (6757 times) and ‘BJP’ (3855 times), which appear to
be related because the term Modi refers to India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, and the
term BJP refers to PM Modi's political party, which currently rules the country. Similarly,
BJP is the top term for NDTV India, with 34864 occurrences, indicating that the audience of
this news channel is more interested in and sharing positive or negative opinions on political
events. However, the top term for India TV is found to be India (4318 times), demonstrating
viewers' patriotism and care for the country India, or perhaps because of the name of the new
channel itself. The top word for the station Republic Bharat is Arnab (112265 times), which
indicates that the audience is fascinated with the channel's primary anchor Arnab Goswami.
The public is more intrigued by political affairs and happenings, and also likes fancies and
idolises notable people, as seen by the generated top terms of each news channel.
Table 7 shows the top ten terms for each news channel based on Mozdeh's analysis. The term
Modi is determined to be a common term among four news channels that are either at the top,
such as AajTak, or second, such as ABP News, India TV, and NDTV India. Except for
Republic Bharat, all of the top phrases in the table below are nearly the same but in different
positions. The top terms on AajTak, ABP News, India TV, and NDTV India reveal a theme
involving political parties, India, foreign conflicts, health issues, and farmer issues. The topic
of the news station Republic Bharat, on the other hand, is significantly different from the rest,
with shows highlighting the audience's idolization of the channel's chief anchor and
engagement in the investigation of crime-related incidents such as the Sushant Singh Rajput
suicide case.
[Table 7: Ranking of words according to each news channel]
Time series graph of prominent term
A time-series visualisation approach was used to answer the research question as to how the
selected popular terms appeared in the comments on the videos uploaded by the top five
Hindi news networks over the study period. A time series is a visual representation of events
that shows the fluctuation of the input query or the general time variation of the searched
term across time. The time series visualisations for the dataset of comments (that also
captures the time the comment was left on Youtube) were created using the Graph Time
Series function in the Analyze tab of Mozdeh software. The feature allows users to type a
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query phrase or a collection of terms into a search box to get a list of day-by-day occurrences
of the searched term during the study’s time period (March 2020 to March 2021).
For the present study, we selected the five key phrases for generating time series that were
extremely popular and emphasised.
We selected the queries in to assess the phrases Narendra Modi (query terms: Narendra Modi,
PM Modi, Modi ji); Corona Virus (query terms: Corona Virus, Covid 19); farmers protest
(query terms: Farmers protest, kisan andolon, tractor rally); and Election (query terms:
Election, Rajneeti, BJP, Congress).
Time series distribution of the term Narendra Modi
[Figure 3: Time series display of term Narendra Modi]
The month-by-month distribution of the time series of the undertaken key phrase Narendra
Modi per news channel is depicted in Figure 3. The phrase emerged in the comments of
NDTV India channel viewers in January 2021 (5882 times), expressing dissatisfaction with
Prime Minister Modi and the administration over two farm laws enacted by the country's
Rajya Sabha. The news channel Republic Bharat had the second-highest rise, with 4640 times
in November 2020 owing to Arnab's bail case, followed by NDTV India in February 2021
(3913 times) due to the election campaign in West Bengal, where PM Modi was a candidate.
Time series distribution of the key phrase Corona Virus
[Figure 4: Time series display of term Corona Virus]
The time series associated with the key phrase Corona Virus, an infectious respiratory
ailment transmitted by a virus recently found in Wuhan, China, posing a threat to humanity,
is shown in Figure 4. Viewers of Republic Bharat recorded the most instances of the word
coronavirus or Covid 19 in August 2020(816 times). The word was popular in the context of
the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case, when the public accused the police and government of
covering up for corruption citing coronavirus. Due to the current viral epidemic and the
seriousness of the update of its infectious nature and contagiousness in India, the channel
ABP News is ranked second in March 2020, with 648 instances of reoccurrence of the
phrase.
Time series distribution of the key phrase Farmers Protest
[Figure 5: Time series display of term Farmer Protest]
The time series distribution per channel for the selected key phrase Farmers protests, which
was a major and popular topic, is shown in Figure 5. The protest garnered national attention
as a result of the country's Rajya Sabha passing two agriculture laws in September 2020.
NDTV India had a greater spike (8268 times) than the other undertaken channels in January
2021, followed by increases in February 2021 (3891 times) and December 2020 (3787 times).
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Time series distribution of the key phrase Elections

[Figure 6: Time series display of term Election]
Figure 6 shows the time series distribution of the key phrase Election across all of the
selected news channels for the current study, ordered by month. Since the country was amidst
election campaign, there were numerous comments about the election and the political
parties' campaigns, as well as the dissemination of information to the public. Due to the West
Bengal election campaign on NDTV India news channel, the greatest word frequency was
noticed in March 2021, with 8082 times, followed by January 2021 with 7645 times and
November 2020 with 6002 times of recurrences.
The occurrence of the five most popular and prominent key phrases in the viewers' comments
written in response to the videos released by the selected news channels was investigated. It
has been observed that the viewers of the channel NDTV India are keen to discuss on a topic
such as Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister, farmers' protests against the government, and
elections. The second news channel to be mentioned is Republic Bharat, which received a lot
of attention for its views on the coronavirus and the Sushant Singh Rajput suicide case. Other
news channels, such as Aaj Tak and India TV, have had the smallest upsurge for all selected
key phrases, with the exception of ABP News, which was somewhat higher than the other
two (Aaj Tak and India TV).
Discussion and Conclusion
With the shift of news channels on digital media, the news channels have adopted methods to
reach their audiences and have also created their own official YouTube channel which shows
their programmes directly linked to Television programmes. The results of the present study
broaden our understanding of what type of videos spark interest and discussion on social
media platforms, considering comments on YouTube videos as a dataset. The sentiment
analysis is an approach to analyze the publicly available opinion to evaluate the impact of any
social event or product to improve the services to satisfy the consumers of that particular
product through various techniques (Grljević and Bošnjak, 2018). Digital media content has
been enormously increasing day by day so the evaluation of its quality is very much needed
and sentiment analysis is the definite procedure to attain the knowledge in understanding the
need and make improvements according to the audience. Sentiment analysis is regarded as
the newest and advanced technique for opinion evaluation and has always a scope for further
study with any digital content or social media.
The study highlights the popularity and recognition of the news channels among the common
people. The study selected five Hindi news channels in India evaluating their Television
Rating Points ranked by BARC. The growth trend of the comments was extracted from the
five Hindi news channels within the definite time range of March 2020 to March 2021. A
whole total of 1,710,049 comments was derived among which Republic Bharat had the
greater sum of comments compared to the other four channels with 955,910 comments
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despite its late establishment in 2017 whereas the least total extracted comments is from India
TV with 84,580 comments. Sentiment analysis of average sentiments of each news channel
with 95% confidence reveal that average sentiment of AajTak, ABP News and India TV
channel is negative while NDTV India and Republic Bharat displays average positive
sentiments of the comments. Meanwhile, the female comments contribution (total 56,494) is
seen to be in greater number than male comment contributors (total 34,853) as a whole but
indifferentiable gender category has the highest value with 1,618,655 comments.
From the evaluation of the category of uploaded videos, it is found that the news channels are
uploading more news videos about crime and investigation, politics, health, and protests
while uploading fewer news videos covering travel, science and technology, and religion.
While the viewers of the participating news channels are more interested in giving their
thoughts or opinions in the form of comments on news videos concerning crime, politics,
protests, and health, or that these videos inspire conversation on YouTube.
The theme trend of the undertaken news channels determined through word frequency is
mainly based on either popularity of PM Modi or Arnab Goswami or political party BJP or
country India. The time series analysis of selected four popular key phrases such as Narendra
Modi, Corona Virus, farmers protest and election revealed that the viewers of the channel
NDTV India keenly discussed on topics such as Narendra Modi, India's Prime Minister,
farmers' protests against the government, and elections. Other news channels, such as Aaj
Tak and India TV, have had the smallest upsurge for all selected key phrases, with the
exception of ABP News, which was somewhat higher than the other two (Aaj Tak and India
TV).
The study describes the critical thinking of the worldwide audience of the undertaken Hindi
news channels through evaluating their comments, where it is discovered that the viewers are
influenced by crime news, political events and concerned with health-related news viewers.
The significance of the study lies in proposing a novel methodology for understanding the
interest of audiences of news content who consume news through the social media. The
study’s focus was to understand the type of videos uploaded by Indian news channels and
kind of interest it generated in the audience. Although the study has country specific data, the
methodology could be used to conduct similar studies in other countries to answer the
research questions in the context of other countries. The study has certain limitations as well.
The most significant constraint is that the data only contains comments that were retrieved by
the Mozdeh software using the channel Ids of each news channel. It is possible that some
comments were not recovered owing to YouTube restrictions. The data will be significant in
comprehending the overall trends because the research determines average sentiments and
word occurrences. Another limitation is the study's cross-sectional character, which included
data from March 2020 to March 2021. As a result, the issues that were hot at the time in the
geographical region were only covered by news channels, resulting in clear biases in the data
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set. This research has the potential to be expanded in the future by lengthening the time frame
and increasing the number of channels in the study with more focused key phrases to review
the viewers’ satisfaction and understand their point of view.
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What news sparks interest on YouTube? A study of news content uploaded by

*Corresponding Author: mailvinitkumar@gmail.com

freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge, freedom of opportunity, and freedom

[Figure 1: Graph of average comments extracted per news channel]

viewers’ views we used the site WordCloud (https://www.wordclouds.com/) inputting the

Time series distribution of the key phrase Elections

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