Humour vs Informational Content on YouTube: A Mixed Method Study of Audience Engagement

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between humour and audience engagement in YouTube content with a relative focus on humorous and the informational communication styles. In today's world of the digital media, YouTube creators are rapidly combining humour, storytelling and information to maintain the audience's attention and improve their engagement rate overall. This report's goal is to understand how humour influences the viewer's interaction, attention retention, relatability and creator loyalty among the newer and young audiences consuming the long-form YouTube content. A mixed method research design was used for this report. The primary data was collected by a structured online survey distributed among people aged from 18–27 who actively consume YouTube content. A total of 104 valid responses were analysed using descriptive statistics and Spearman’s Rank Correlation Coefficient to examine relationships between humour related engagement variables and audience retention variables. The statistical technique was selected due to the ordinal nature of the Likert-scale survey data and the non-parametric characteristics of the data. The results indicate that humour positively influences audience engagement, attention retention and revisitation behaviour. A statistically significant moderate positive correlation was found between humour based engagement and memory retention (Spearman’s rho = .533, p < .001), suggesting that audiences who showed stronger engagement with humorous content also tend to show higher retention and recall and another significant positive correlation was found between humour driven interaction and creator loyalty (Spearman’s rho = .464, p < .001), indicating that humorous content may contribute to sustained audience engagement and repeated viewership. This project further explores that audiences prefer a balanced combination of humour and information while purely informational content continues to be perceived as more credible and trustworthy for serious discussions. This concludes that humour functions as an important communication strategy within creator driven digital media ecosystems by enhancing audience engagement without entirely replacing informational value.