What Makes a Headline go Viral on youtube.com?

Abstract

The article presents a descriptive linguistic investigation of communicative features and communication foci, as well as ‘theme and rheme progression’ analysis of rhetoric structures of video headlines on youtube.com video hosting, distinguished with over 15,000 and more ‘likes’ or viewings. Youtube.com videos are viewed as creolized media-messages – semiotic entities, based on verbal headline and the movie content dialectic unity. The research makes an attempt to elicit typical rhetoric tools and strategies, used in video headlines in order to promote viewings, likes, sharing and popularity. One of the most prominent functional components of a ‘headline as utterance’ rhetoric is that of ‘attention-grabber’, focusing on new, relevant, and triggering emotions message for the viewer. The article pays close attention to two-focus rhematic structure of the yootube.com video headlines. As a result, two degrees of topic expression in the videos headlines are distinguished. The article introduces classification of video headlines based on linguarhetoric analysis, which includes headlines-messages, headlinesassertions, headlines-citings, and finally – headlines in the form of either a reflexive question or a rhetorical question. Most popular on youtube.com headlines cover the following functional semantic micro-genres: ‘List Posts’(36 per cent), ‘How-to posts’(23 per cent), ‘Resource Posts’ (17 per cent), ‘Heart-toheart’ posts (10 per cent), ‘Question posts’ (14 per cent). Keywords—headline semantic and pragmatic complex, attention focus, theme and rheme, media discourse analysis