Analysis of the effectiveness of the viral marketing strategy in Japanese gaming companies: a comparative study of YouTube advertising videos and audience engagement

This paper is devoted to the identification of the real effectiveness of viral marketing in comparison with conventional advertising in the field of Japanese game industry on the example of the game "Elden Ring". This work was caused by the fact that as YouTube develops as a platform for content sharing, the number of opinion leaders, people with a large number of subscribers on their channels, whose opinion is important for their audience and to whom game studios pay more and more attention, buying advertising and promoting their product on the market of game industry offers, has increased. Such a shift of emphasis from the usual advertising to viral advertising can be ambiguous for the popularity of the studios' products, because, as the conducted practical research has shown, the usual advertising can be more effective in attracting the user and increasing the activity. The fulfillment of the tasks given in the introduction allowed us to create a theoretical framework and find the optimal methodology for analyzing statistical data. In addition to achieving the objective of the work, the text also presents hypotheses built on data collected through the YouTube API. As a result of their testing, conclusions were drawn about the videos, among the most notable ones, it was found that the fewer tags under the video, the higher the number of views. Also, it was found that the category of the videos proved to be unimportant to the number of "Like" marks under them. In addition to conducting practical work using descriptive statistics presented in the form of using Kolmogorov-Smirnov criterion, Spearman and Pearson correlation coefficient and chi-square criterion, the first half of the paper presents materials conceptualizing the concept of "viral marketing", gives examples of its manifestation, provides an overview of YouTube studies similar to this paper using data analytics. Given the use of Python software and programming language and libraries "pandas", "matplotlib", "randan", this work is a combination of different interdisciplinary approaches, which increases its novelty. As a result of the work done, options for further development of the study have been proposed. One of the possible further research options is to expand the video sample, possibly with the evaluation of older games, when game studios were more active in creating viral videos with an unusual plot. Given the limitations of this study, a similar analysis of Western games should be conducted to find out the differences between the approaches of the Japanese game industry and the global one.