USDA Agricultural Checkoff Programs’ YouTube Presence and Video Quality

Abstract

YouTube has existed since 2005. Since that time, many marketing professionals have used the site to combine sight, sound, motion, and emotion to appeal to a target audience. USDA-regulated and producer-funded agricultural research and promotion, or checkoff programs, are no different, and many have used YouTube’s platform to reach consumers. This study analyzed the USDA-overseen commodity checkoff programs’ YouTube presence for views, subscribers, mean length, and number of posted videos. Researchers also analyzed the overall quality of videos, visual frames of the most popular videos, and the quality of the group’s YouTube homepage.The YouTube pages were mostly consistent with the brand and categorized videos into playlists, or frames, with recipe videos being the most common. The most watched video had more than nine million views. In many instances, high quality garnered higher viewership, but not always. Content targeted at the audience brought lots of views, more so than quality. Videos that were approximately one minute in length, in general, were viewed more often than longer videos.