Comments on YouTube

For my individual project I collected data from YouTube videos, concentrating on the relationships between the following variables: # of views, # of comments, length of video, and comment/view ratio. While I rejected my hypotheses, I found a positive correlation between # of comments and comment/view ratio. It may seem obvious that videos with more comments should have a higher comment/view ratio, but I think it reveals a trend among internet usage: The average internet user is more likely to participate in a conversation if one is already going. Thus, viewers will be more likely to comment on videos that have a lot of comments already, because a dialogue has already been started. While my small sample size prevented me from being able to assert a statistically significant relationship, I think that continuation of this research with a larger "n" and slight methodological changes could reveal such a relationship.