What is being uploaded on YouTube?: Analysis of fitness-related YouTube video titles pre- and post-Covid-19 in Korea

Abstract

Opportunities to participate in physical activities (PA) and fitness exercises in public and private facilities have been reduced or banned due to social distancing regulations during the height of the global pandemic. Though Korea has not experienced lockdown, several venues have been restricted to prevent the spread of Covid-19. Despite the limitations of PA engagement, people have found alternative activities by using online platforms to keep active and fit. Thus, this study focuses on analyzing fitness-related video titles from YouTube. By collecting data through text mining and conducting network analysis, it provides basic knowledge of the fitness trends from pre- and post-Covid-19. As a result, ‘exercise’ was found to have the highest tendency and had strong connections to keywords that indicated specific methods of working out to become fit, but it also had connections to trendy keywords such as ‘hip-up’ and ‘body-profile’ which reflect the fitness culture in Korea.

Keywords:

• Covid-19
• fitness
• text mining
• network analysis
• YouTube

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Korea Consumer Agency, 2021, “The promotion and consumer issues of home-training during Covid-19”, retrieved from: https://www.kca.go.kr/home/sub.do?menukey=6079&mode=view&no=1003065899.

2 Naver and Daum are the two most-used online search engines in Korea, an equivalent to Google.

3 Seoul Legal Administration Services, references of policies and articles, retrieved on Jul 16, 22 from website: https://legal.seoul.go.kr/legal/english/front/page/law.html?pAct=lawComparison&pPRomNo=2537#article_13

4 The numbers on the figures indicate the clusters. 1 is the first category (orange), 2 is the second category (green), 3 is the third category (red), 4 is the fourth category (blue), and 5 is the fifth category (yellow).

5 Refer to Table 4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea (미래형스포츠인재양성교육연구단).