Malayalam YouTube Study Reveals How Regional Audiences Shape Digital Culture

A new study of YouTube channels producing content in Malayalam, the language spoken primarily in the southern Indian state of Kerala, offers one of the most detailed portraits yet of how regional-language audiences behave in the post-broadcast media environment. Published in SN Social Sciences by P. R. Biju and Drisya G. M. M, political scientists based at Government Brennen College in Thalassery, Kerala, the research analysed 100 YouTube channels across ten content genres between May and October 2025. From each channel, the researchers selected ten videos and harvested the top 100 comments from every video, assembling a qualitative corpus of approximately 100,000 viewer comments. The sheer scale of the dataset is what makes the findings notable: rather than treating audience engagement as a single metric of likes or view counts, the study dissects the actual texture of what viewers write, ask, criticise and joke about beneath the videos they watch.

The theoretical backdrop of the work is the well-documented shift from broadcasting to what media scholars call the post-broadcast era. For most of the twentieth century, television and radio operated on a one-to-many model in which a small number of institutions decided what audiences would see and when. That model has been dismantled by streaming platforms, on-demand viewing and, crucially, by platforms such as YouTube where the audience is also the producer. The researchers situate Kerala’s media landscape squarely within this transformation. Kerala has one of India’s highest rates of digital penetration and a long history of vibrant print and visual culture, and the Kerala Migration Survey 2023, cited in the study, underscores how deeply the state is connected to global flows of people, money and media. Malayalam YouTube sits at the intersection of these forces: a global platform infrastructure carrying intensely local linguistic and cultural production.

Methodologically, the study relied on qualitative digital ethnography rather than automated sentiment analysis. The authors manually read and coded the comment corpus, applying thematic analysis and qualitative data condensation to distil recurring patterns from the noise of roughly 100,000 individual comments. This choice matters technically. Automated classifiers can count sentiment at scale, but they struggle with code-switching between Malayalam and English, with sarcasm, with regional idioms and with the layered in-jokes that characterise comment sections in any language community. Manual thematic coding, by contrast, allowed the researchers to identify four distinct and recurring forms of viewer response: emotional, informational, critical, and humour or reaction-based engagement. Each of these categories represents a different mode of participation, and each was found to be distributed unevenly across the ten content genres the study examined.

Emotional engagement, the first of the four response types, encompasses expressions of affection, empathy, admiration and solidarity directed at creators or at subjects within the videos. Informational engagement, the second, captures comments in which viewers add context, correct details, ask questions or share their own knowledge, effectively turning the comment section into a supplementary knowledge layer attached to the video. Critical engagement, the third, includes disagreement, scepticism, debate and outright challenge, indicating that audiences in this regional-language ecosystem are not passive consumers but active evaluators of what they watch. The fourth category, humour and reaction-based responses, covers memes, jokes, playful teasing and expressive reactions, a form of engagement that often travels furthest because it is the most quotable and shareable. The finding that these four modes cluster differently by genre is one of the study’s central contributions, since it demonstrates that engagement is not a generic property of YouTube but a genre-specific phenomenon shaped by what kind of content the video offers.

The genre dimension of the analysis deserves particular attention. The ten genres spanned the breadth of Malayalam-language production, and the researchers found that the dominant mode of audience response shifted accordingly. Content genres built around personal storytelling or lifestyle material tended to attract emotional responses, while educational, informational and explanatory genres drew a heavier share of informational comments, with viewers supplementing, questioning or extending the video’s content. Entertainment and comedy-oriented channels generated disproportionate volumes of humour and reaction-based comments, and genres touching on public affairs, social issues or contested cultural topics provoked the sharpest critical engagement. This genre-by-genre variation has practical implications for anyone building an audience on the platform: the same subscriber base will behave differently depending on what it is being shown, and creators who understand the engagement profile of their genre can design content and comment-section strategies accordingly.

The study also documents how creators engineer continuing participation through recurring and serialised content formats. Rather than publishing one-off videos, successful Malayalam creators structure their output as series, episodic features, recurring segments and formats that deliberately invite viewers to return, anticipate the next instalment and carry conversations across videos. This serialisation is a recognised technique in platform-era cultural production, and the Malayalam evidence shows it operating in a regional-language context: the format logic of global YouTube is being localised, adapted and recombined with Kerala’s own storytelling traditions. The researchers frame this as evidence that a global platform develops distinctive forms of content production and audience participation within a regional-language and cultural setting, rather than simply imposing a uniform global template.

Gender representation emerges as another significant axis of the findings. The study reports that creator gender representation varies across genres, meaning that men and women are not evenly distributed across the ten content categories examined. Some genres are dominated by male creators while others show stronger female participation, a pattern that echoes broader debates in the creator-economy literature about which domains of digital cultural production are open to whom. The authors draw on gender theory in framing this analysis, and while the study does not quantify the imbalance in the abstract, the observation that representation is genre-dependent rather than uniform is itself analytically important. It suggests that barriers and opportunities for women creators in Kerala’s digital sphere are structured by content category, not by the platform as a whole, which has implications for how interventions to broaden participation should be designed.

The research also connects its findings to the political economy of the attention economy. In a media environment where human attention is the scarce resource, creators compete not only with each other but with the entire global catalogue of the platform, and the study’s Kerala context sharpens this point. Regional-language creators are competing for the same attention as English-language content, and their ability to sustain engagement depends on cultivating forms of participation, emotional, informational, critical and humorous, that bind viewers to a channel over time. The engagement taxonomy developed in the study can be read as a map of the currencies in this attention market: each response type represents a different investment by the viewer, and each carries different value for the creator’s visibility, community and revenue.

There are also broader implications for how scholars and policymakers understand regional-language digital cultures. India’s platform ecosystem is often discussed in terms of Hindi and English content, but the Malayalam case shows that linguistic communities develop their own production conventions, engagement norms and cultural logics within the same global infrastructure. The study’s authors position their work within a growing body of scholarship on the localisation of global platforms, and their evidence from Kerala adds a granular, comment-level dataset to that conversation. For media researchers, the four-part engagement taxonomy offers a transferable analytical framework that could be applied to other regional-language YouTube ecosystems in India and beyond. For platform designers and regulators, the findings underscore that audience participation is not a single dial to be optimised but a differentiated set of behaviours that respond to genre, format and cultural context.

The study, published on 16 October 2026 as volume 6, article 554 of SN Social Sciences, ultimately makes the case that the post-broadcast era is not a single global condition but a family of locally inflected media environments. In Kerala, the collapse of the broadcast gatekeeping model has not produced a homogenised digital culture; it has produced a Malayalam digital culture, with its own genres, its own serialised formats, its own gendered patterns of participation and its own fourfold grammar of audience response. As regional-language content continues to grow across the Indian platform sphere, research of this kind provides the empirical grounding needed to understand not just how many people are watching, but what they are actually doing when they type a comment beneath a video, and what those hundred thousand small acts of participation reveal about the future of cultural production in a platformised world.

Subject of Research: Audience engagement and digital cultural production in regional-language YouTube content in Kerala, India

Article Title: Audience engagement and digital cultural production in the post-broadcast media environment: evidence from Malayalam YouTube

Article References: Audience engagement and digital cultural production in the post-broadcast media environment: evidence from Malayalam YouTube. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43545-026-01781-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43545-026-01781-2

Keywords: Malayalam YouTube, audience engagement, post-broadcast media, digital ethnography, regional language content, digital cultural production, participatory culture, platformization, Kerala media, creator economy, content genres, gender representation