In journalism clasess they tell you that ‘lede’, basically the intro lines, are the key to news reports. But that is old-school print journalism. Now things have gravitated towards videos. Vlogs have become enormously popular. YouTube, which hosts millions of vlogs across myriad languages, has shared some interesting insights in the kind of intro words that most hosts tend to be partial towards.
Many YouTubers tend to open their videos with the phrase: “Hey guys”.
It was used in around 36% of the videos in the study that was carried out for 2020.
The YouTube study and its findings
YouTube identified all the videos it could classify as vlogs, all time, using minimum thresholds of at least 20,000 views for the videos and at least 20,000 subscribers for the channels that produced them. It gave it a data of 1 million videos.
Then the YouTube parsed all available captions — both auto captions and those uploaded by creators.
“The results confirmed the supremacy of “Hey guys,” but revealed more than a few other interesting facts about the vagaries of video salutations from across the globe,” YouTube said.
While “Hey guys” has been the preferred greeting for the last decade, “Good morning” has progressively become popular too, while “Hi everyone” seems well on its way to oblivion.
Greetings change with video categories
YouTube said the dominance of “Hey guys” isn’t absolute. “When you break things down and look at distinct categories, other greetings assert themselves. Fitness channels, for example, favor “What’s up” (your heart rate, maybe?), while travel channels opt for “Good morning” (signaling the sunrise-like possibilities that lie waiting beyond the horizon. Or something.),” the video platform said.
It added that there’s a familiar flavour to greetings across languages and places. In Brazil, the top greeting on YouTube is “Oi gente,” which translates to “Hey guys” in Portuguese. Likewise, Mexican creators use “Hola amigos,” while, in France, they prefer a cheerful “Bonjour à tous,” or “Hello to all.”
