Relationship Between Cultural Distance and Cross-Cultural Music Video Consumption on YouTube

With the wide diffusion of social media like YouTube in the world, it becomes much easier to access foreign cultural products, which facilitates cross-cultural consumption of media content. Despite the rapid growth of cross-cultural consumption online, there is a dearth of large-scale studies examining how cultural products originated from certain culture are consumed and enjoyed among users of different cultures. Three data sets are used in the study, namely, (1) users’ online activities on Korean Pop (K-pop) music videos on YouTube crawled via open Application Programming Interface, (2) Hofstede’s five-dimensional model of national culture, and (3) official statistics gathered by World Bank. By combining three data sets, this study investigates how K-pop music videos are consumed across a variety of cultures. Based on prior studies examining the relationship between cultural distance and export/import of cultural goods, this study extracted two seemingly contrasting hypotheses, that is, (1) cultural proximity hypothesis, emphasizing cultural similarity as a main motive for cross-cultural consumption and (2) cultural exoticism hypothesis, highlighting cultural difference driving cross-cultural consumption. Results show that K-pop music video consumption is highest among countries both whose cultures are very similar to Korean culture and whose cultures are very different, indicating that both hypotheses are empirically supported. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are also discussed.