Effect of Online Fitness Challenges on User’ Exercising Behavior: The Case of Youtube Fitness Channels

Abstract

Despite the boom of the fitness industry and recent technological developments that enhance physical activity, individuals still experience barriers to consistent exercise. Recently, the online fitness market has expanded through the growing popularity of fitness apps and online workouts posted on social media. One way that these fitness creators have kept their audience engaged is fitness challenges, that is, a workout plan published by a creator with defined start and end dates. We use the context of YouTube yoga channels to estimate the effect of such challenges on the performance of the hosting channels and their followers’ activity during and after the challenges. We collect data for 21 popular yoga channels on YouTube and estimate the impact of a total of 37 fitness challenges. We demonstrate that fitness challenges improve aggregate channel performance, such as daily views, engagements, new followers, and views per follower, both during and after a challenge. Further, we analyze user comments content and demonstrate that habit formation, community support, and improved physical performance might be the mechanisms behind the effectiveness of the fitness challenges. Finally, we show that individual users are more likely to comment on the channel during and after the challenge. Overall, our findings suggest that fitness challenges can be an efficient strategy for fitness workout creators to improve performance and for content consumers to increase engagement. The findings have several important implications for fitness content creators, consumers, sponsors, and policymakers.

Keywords: social media analytics, exercising, YouTube