A Comparative Analysis of the Impact of Barrage and Comments on Video Popularity

In recent years, watching online videos has gradually become an indispensable part of netizens’ daily lives. Almost all video sites have added the barrage function. Both barrage and comments are two important ways for users to participate and play an important role in online video viewing. Based on the barrage and comments of videos uploaded by users of the bilibili website, our research explores the impact of barrage and comments with different emotional tendencies on video popularity and their differences, and explores the moderating effect of comments on the impact of the barrage. We also propose a method for calculating the emotional intensity of barrage that considers the herd effect and the emotional attenuation. The study finds that barrage has a positive impact on video popularity, while the emotional intensity of positive comments has a negative impact on video popularity, and comments play a negative role in the impact of the barrage. It explains that barrage and comments have their advantages and disadvantages. Our research has expanded the research in related fields such as user-generated content and video popularity, and the research conclusions have important management significance for video websites. In future research, we can further refine the emotional classification and consider the impact of video characteristics (video content and subtitles) on video popularity.