Social mediatization of religion: islamic videos on YouTube

Based on the conceptual framework of social mediatization of religion, this paper seeks to understand three pertinent phenomena: trends of online religious content, users' engagement with them, and correlations between interaction indicators. To answer the research inquiries, we quantitatively analyzed 73,120 Islamic videos uploaded on YouTube in 2011-2020. The result shows that Islamic videos on YouTube are growing continuously without any decline, from 6.04% in 2011 to 13.11% in 2019, more than two-fold in eight years. Also, with a strong positive correlation, comments and likes (r = .862; p < .01) are increasing at a remarkable rate than the other interaction variables. We observed that users who watch Islamic videos are more likely to like the videos than to dislike them. Users' engagement is not related to the length of Islamic videos in any significant way. These two results partly suggest users' positive and supportive attitudes toward online Islamic videos. Finally, this study recommends investigating the thematic temporal distribution of Islamic videos for an in-depth understanding of the users' topical interest patterns.