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1. Introduction
YouTube is a vast video-sharing platform that allows users to view, like, comment on, share and upload videos (Feroz Khan and Vong, 2014; Teixeira and Kornfeld, 2015). With approximately 1.9 billion monthly visits, YouTube is the second most visited website globally. It is also the second largest search engine, behind only Google. YouTube specializes in videos, which are a highly engaging form of content. Indeed, one billion hours of video content are watched each day on YouTube and approximately 78% of Internet users watch videos weekly (Chi, 2019). To capitalize on videos' growing popularity, firms are investing in YouTube and video marketing more broadly. Today, video marketing is the fastest-growing digital marketing segment (Picard, 2019), and video ad spending has surpassed $129 billion in the USA (Enberg, 2019).
With YouTube's expanding role in firms' digital marketing mix, greater research attention is being devoted to YouTube marketing, examining its various facets including the virality of YouTube videos (Feroz Khan and Vong, 2014; Nielson-Field et al., 2013; Tellis et al., 2019),the advertising effectiveness of YouTube videos (Tucker, 2015; Vedula et al., 2017) and their sales effects (Oh et al., 2017). Although available studies have contributed to increased understanding of YouTube's marketing impact, relatively little is known about the drivers of video views on YouTube. Extant research has primarily investigated viewers' post-view engagement behavior, such as likes (Vedula et al., 2017), comments (Dessart and Pitardi, 2019; Moldovan et al., 2019; Vedula et al., 2017) and shares (Oh et al., 2017; Tellis et al., 2019). This dearth of research on video views is surprising given that video views feed into other forms of user engagement behavior on YouTube. Viewers respond to brands by liking, commenting on and sharing videos, or forming a positive brand attitude and purchase intention, only after they have viewed videos. As video views supersede other forms of user engagement, additional research on the drivers of video views on YouTube is warranted.
Accordingly, this study aims to investigate how marketers' video optimization practices on YouTube contribute to video views. Video optimization is a set of practices that marketers implement to make their videos visible by leveraging YouTube's ranking and recommendation algorithms (Choudhari and Bhalla, 2015;...