Analysis of YouTube Viewers' Characteristics and Responses to Virtual Idols

버추얼 아이돌에 대한 유튜브 시청자 특성과 반응 분석

Due to the advancement of virtual reality technology, virtual idols are widely used in industrial and cultural content industries. However, it is difficult to utilize virtual idols' social perceptions because they are not properly understood. Therefore, this paper collected and analyzed YouTube comments to identify differences about social perception through comparative analysis between virtual idols and general idols. The dataset was constructed by crawling comments from music videos with more than 10 million views of virtual idols and more than 10,000 comments. Keyword frequency and TF-IDF values were derived from the collected dataset, and the connection centrality CONCOR cluster was analyzed with a semantic network using the UCINET program. As a result of the analysis, it was found that virtual idols frequently used keywords such as "person," "quality," "character," "reality," "animation," while reactions and perceptions were derived from general idols. Based on the results of this analysis, it was found that while general idols are mainly evaluated with their appearance and cultural factors, social perceptions of virtual idols' values are mixed with evaluations of cultural factors such as "song," "voice," and "choreography," focusing on technical factors such as "people," "quality," "character," and "animation." However, keywords such as "song," "voice," "choreography," and "music" are included in the top 30 like regular idols and appear in the same cluster, suggesting that virtual idols are gradually shifting away from minority tastes to mainstream culture. This study aims to provide academic and practical implications for the future expansion of the industry and cultural content industry of virtual idols by grasping the social perception of virtual idols.