What’s in a title? It turns out, not a lot—even when it comes to YouTube Reviews.
How does word choice affect performance on YouTube?
My question when analyzing YouTube videos was simple: do YouTube reviews with negative words in the title (such as sucks, lame, not good, etc.) perform better than reviews that have neutral or positive words in the title? None of the guides on How to Make the Best YouTube Titles even mentioned the idea, except to warn against using profanity or offensive language.
Many YouTube channel authors believe that negative reviews perform better. They believe that channels that focus on criticism get more likes, more views, and more subscribers than neutral or positive channels. Cinema Sins, a satirical movie review channel, has a lucrative business empire built entirely around nitpicking blockbusters. Comedians such as Uncle Roger get millions of views tearing apart awful cooking videos. Other channels, like Folding Ideas and hbomberguy, take literal hours to (informatively) roast movies and TV shows that absolutely failed at the basics of filmmaking and storytelling.
But does negativity actually sell?
Analyzing Titles
I gathered my data: a convenience sample of the top 30 videos that came up when I searched “review” in YouTube’s search engine. Due to YouTube’s search algorithm, the videos that popped up were a mixture of topics similar to videos I had seen before, topics I was interested in, and high-performing videos for that day. High-performing videos are longer videos (approximately 15–30 minutes long) that have a high amount of views.
I saw YouTube reviews on a wide variety of topics: everything from custom Lego sets to hidden noodle tours in Vietnam. What astounded me wasn’t the topics, though. It’s natural to review food, toys, movies, and phones. What astounded me was that the vast majority of these reviews appeared to have neutral titles.
To ensure objectivity in my analysis, I developed categories in the form of a codebook (see below). Neutral means that there were no positive or negative words in the title. Instead, reviewers simply described what they reviewed. Out of my sample of 30 YouTube videos, analyzed by myself and a coder that resulted in an agreement score of 1.00 (Cohen’s kappa), 18 videos (60%) had completely neutral titles.
Why so neutral? Generally reviews don’t spoil their verdict until you get into the video. Instead, by not revealing the outcome through the words in the title, they entice people to watch the video.
But what about those negative videos? Seven out of 30 is still a sizeable number—approximately 23% of the sample size. Did those videos perform better than the meager three positive reviews?
Views and Likes vs. Negativity
In addition to dividing the video titles into the positive, negative, and neutral categories,I analyzed the titles in three ways: average likes for a category, average views for a category, and a ratio of likes to views.
I discovered that negatively-titled videos have far less views than neutrally-titled videos. Neutrally-titled videos on average have 1,938,801 views, but negatively-titled videos have only 841,404 average views. Yet negatively-titled videos have about the same like-to-view ratio as neutral video titles, approximately 4:100. In contrast, positive title videos have far more views on average (almost 4 million views), but a lower like-to-view ratio (2:100) than neutral videos.
Conclusion: Does Negativity Sell?
So, is the YouTube review community right? In a way, yes. Negatively-titled reviews do have fewer views—but the fact that they have the same like-to-view ratio as neutral reviews indicates that people do like and interact with these videos. In contrast, positively-titled reviews get way more views than negative or neutral—but fewer likes.
What should you do, then? Well, it depends on your content strategy. Need tons of views to build your channel? Post a positively titled review. Need more engagement? You’ll probably want to post a negatively-titled review. But if you want to keep it safe, neutral titles are a good way to go.
In the end, negativity does sell—as long as it aligns with your content strategy.