Will Sentiments in Comments Influence Online Video Popularity?

Online videos become popular but most users ignored the functions such as comment and like or dislike and merely focused on number of views. This research deploys sentiment analysis to investigate the influence of comments and construct a video popularity model. We also use the concept of appraisal theory as the foundation in the proposed model that indicates the viewers may have different decisions of watching behavior when revealing the sentiment behind the existed comments. We selected 8 channels on YouTube for experiments. There were 306 videos and 59,103 comments and we collected 200 samples. The results showed high number of views may not result in high positive comments. The influence of own factors of videos such as title of videos, video thumbnail, and content was higher than objective factors such as number of views, like or dislike, and sentiment analysis. Finally, we discovered sentiment indirectly influences the decision of watching behavior.