Exploring the community of older adult viewers on YouTube

Abstract

We report on a study of how older adult viewers use YouTube. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 older adults residing in the Republic of Korea who had recently watched videos on YouTube to understand their experiences. We identified themes regarding their perceptions and behaviors when interacting with videos and other viewers on YouTube through an open coding method. The analysis of the identified themes reveals that older adults use YouTube as a tool for collecting information that addresses their challenges when gathering information from media. Although older adult viewers worried about fake news and possible monetary charges, they were eager to watch videos on YouTube because they believed this information to be unbiased compared with media sources. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first interview study to investigate the community of older adult viewers on a video-based social media platform.