Combining Behaviors and Demographics to Segment Online Audiences: Experiments with a YouTube Channel

Social media channels with audiences in the millions are increasingly common. Efforts at segmenting audiences for populations of these sizes can result in hundreds of audience segments, as the compositions of the overall audiences tend to be complex. Although understanding audience segments is important for strategic planning, tactical decision making, and content creation, it is unrealistic for human decision makers to effectively utilize hundreds of audience segments in these tasks. In this research, we present efforts at simplifying the segmentation of audience populations to increase their practical utility. Using millions of interactions with hundreds of thousands of viewers with an organization’s online content collection, we first isolate the maximum number of audience segments, based on behavioral profiling, and then demonstrate a computational approach of using non-negative matrix factorization to reduce this number to 42 segments that are both impactful and representative segments of the overall population. Initial results are promising, and we present avenues for future research leveraging our approach.