Audience Engagement on YouTube: A Merge of Consumer and Media Engagement

This theoretical paper presents a reconceptualisation of “audience engagement” on YouTube and how such a definition may help us to further understand the audience engagement strategies of YouTubers. Audience engagement is commonly referred to as audiences’ participatory activities, including liking, commenting, subscribing, and the direct consumption of video content on YouTube. However, this paper, through the lens of brand marketing and media production, sees YouTubers as both personal brands and content creators. With this angle in mind, the paper discusses how, by seeing YouTubers as personal brands, audience engagement with YouTubers is a form of consumer engagement, a marketing concept that describes the relationship between brands and consumers. The paper will then discuss how, by seeing YouTubers as content creators, audience engagement is also a form of media engagement, the concept that describes audiences' experience of “transportation” when consuming media products. The paper ultimately argues audience engagement with YouTubers is a merge of consumer and media engagement as a multi-dimensional way to understand audience experience on YouTube. The paper proposes that YouTubers’ audience engagement strategies can be understood in two primary ways. The first is from a consumer engagement perspective, by seeing some YouTubers’ strategies as a way of triggering the audience’s active connections outside video consumption, just like other brands’ consumer engagement strategies. The second is from a media engagement perspective, by interpreting some YouTubers’ strategies as a means of encouraging transportation experience among viewers. This paper adds to the existing literature on the concept of audience engagement on YouTube and social media platforms. It also offers a new way of understanding and new directions for exploring YouTubers’ strategies for fan building, from the perspective of consumer and media engagement in today's and future YouTube landscape, where YouTube creators are continuously becoming a convergence of brands and individual personalities.