YouTube is an essential source of news and other necessary information for the Belarusian internet audience, according to various quantitative surveys. Therefore, monitoring it to identify the most popular videos posted during a specific media period, followed by an analysis of target group behavior, is a significant task that requires thoughtful and regular activities.
Compared to the June publication “Five Gold Buttons of Belarusian Propaganda on YouTube”, four more channels were added to the monitoring: the First National Channel of Belarusian Radio (369,000 subscribers), TV Channel Belarus 1 (192,000 subscribers), Belarus 2 (88,100 subscribers), and VoenTV of Belarus (217,000 subscribers).
Methodology
Data was collected using the YouTube API. Processing and visualization were performed using Python libraries – Plotly, Dash. Socio-demographic characteristics of the channels were obtained using Influencer Marketing tools.
In July 2024, almost two thousand posts (1930) were published on nine Belarusian state-owned YouTube channels, which, by August 1, 2024, gathered almost 100 million views!
General parametric characteristics:
As seen from the first chart, more than 90% of the views were gathered by the “five gold buttons,” i.e., channels with more than one million subscribers. CTVBY TV channel posted almost 400 videos and gathered about 40 million views. This group of graphs shows that the most engaging videos for the audience were those posted on the information agency channel – BelTA. They received the most comments.
The most commented video was: SUCH a military parade HAS NEVER BEEN! // Mastery on the ground and in the sky! // July 3, Minsk:
This video gathered more than 2 million views with an hour-long duration. This is quite atypical for videos posted on Belarusian state-owned YouTube channels.
Top 30 videos that gathered the most views:
Half of the videos, all under 60 seconds long, are dedicated to the invasion of the Russian army into Ukrainian territory. Four videos tell about the “failure” of the Olympic Games currently taking place in Paris. Thus, a new kind of misinformation can be identified: sports or Olympic.
An important topic in July 2024 was the imposition of the death penalty and subsequent pardon of a German citizen – Rico Krieger, whom the TV channel “ATN: News of Belarus and the World” referred to as a “SBU puppet”:
However, this video did not make it into the overall top 30 by views. It should be noted that ATN prepared this video in German: Sentenced to death! Confessions of a German terrorist|Rico Krieger is a puppet of the SBU, which gathered only about 22 thousand views. The video in English received even fewer views: Sentenced to death! Confessions of a German terrorist | Rico Krieger — a puppet of the SBU
Now let’s exclude shorts-videos and see how the list of the most viewed videos changes:
We see that the SB TV channel, which “specializes” in short videos covering the war in Ukraine from the aggressor country Russia’s side and misinformation about the Ukrainian leadership, drops out.
All channels published misinformation about neighboring European Union countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Poland). In the studied dataset, there were 21 posts about Latvia, 26 posts about Lithuania, and 55 posts about Poland. Here are the posts published on the BelTA information agency channel about Latvia:
2024-07-02 “It’s just bliss!” // A Russian from Latvia compared roads in Riga and Minsk #shorts – 25,781 views
2024-07-04 “Miss it, you’ll serve!” // Moved from Latvia to Belarus! #shorts – 14,016 views
2024-07-07 “Serve your true master!” // Why are Latvian authorities against everything Russian? #shorts – 25,346 views
2024-07-08 “People are leaving the country in SUCH batches!” // Latvia: Russian ban, terrible roads, and power – 352,058 views
2024-07-09 A Russian from Latvia compared store shelves in Belarus and Latvia! #shorts – 1,369,519 views
2024-07-10 “We can’t even compare with Navalny!” // About opposition and freedom of speech in Latvia #shorts – 11,858 views
2024-07-16 Is Latvia inciting war with Russia? // “Like shamans with drums!” #shorts – 358,008 views
2024-07-20 “Finally ran away from this Reich!” // Blogger from Latvia moved to Belarus: HONEST STORY – 119,525 views
2024-07-29 “Finally, I ran away from this Reich!” // Blogger from Latvia about moving to Belarus #shorts – 5,042 views
2024-07-30 “They call Russians pigs and lice!” // About the attitude of Latvian media towards the Russian population #shorts – 19,372 views
With such rhetoric from the official information agency, it is extremely difficult to build friendly, mutually beneficial relationships between countries. This propaganda only harms relations between the Latvian and Belarusian peoples. However, the visual series of ten videos is based only on the opinion of two people!
It is surprising that almost 500,000 views were gathered by a video about the opening of the XXXIII International Festival of Arts Slavianski Bazaar in Vitebsk on the Belarus 1 channel.
At the same time, 💥💥💥The grand opening of the “Slavianski Bazaar” in Vitebsk – LIVE BROADCAST!!!💥💥💥 on the First Channel of National Radio gathered only 21 thousand views despite being 4 hours long!
An important graph showing the dependence of video duration and the number of views:
This chart shows 1,930 points. The legend shows the short video that gathered the most views.
This time another graph was built showing the dependence of the posting time of videos and the number of views:
Based on the analysis of the video posting time over the past few months, it is observed that the most viewed videos, often scandalous, misinformation-laden, and with clickbait titles, are uploaded in the second half of the workday between 3 and 5 PM. Only the SB TV channel posts videos at 1 AM Minsk time:
- A bright salute concluded the concert in honor of the opening of the Slavianski Bazaar 2024 (2.5 thousand views),
- 💥Ukraine is drowning, Trump is targeting Europe? Will Ukraine get F-16s with pilots? What will remain for Poland? (7 thousand views)
- Let’s sing the anthem together! Festive event on Belarus Independence Day (12.6 thousand views)
The final graph we publish is about the regularity of the publication of the studied state YouTube channels and on which days of the media month they gathered the most views:
The last two graphs show the scale, based on the number, and regularity of video posts. Of course, specific time intervals can be highlighted, and activity decreases on weekends, but on public holidays (for example, July 3 – Independence Day), the number of posts was maximal.
Conclusions
To all previous conclusions, it can be added that the range of the most viewed videos by the Belarusian internet audience is between 200 to 500 thousand views, except for incidents and weather-related events. Videos with a large number of views seem to be oriented towards the Russian audience. In recent weeks, there have been quite a few publications on the topic of YouTube slowing down in the Russian Federation, so regular monitoring of Belarusian YouTube channels becomes even more important to understand how these restrictive measures will affect the Belarusian internet audience.
