The Top 10 YouTube Video Presenter Greeting
If you’re shooting anything other than music video then you’re probably going to want to greet your audience in some way. YouTube did a study to find what was the most popular presenter greeting and came up with the top 10. This came from a data set of over 1 million videos with a minimum of 20,000 views from channels that had at least 20,000 subscribers. These are the top 10 found in the study.
1. “Hey guys.”
2. “What’s Up”
3. “Good Morning.”
4. “Hi guys”
5. “All Right”
6. Hi everyone”
7. “Hey everyone”
8. “What’s going on”
9. “Hello everyone”
10. “Welcome back”
A couple of interesting things here though. First is that “Hey guys” has stood as the #1 greeting for the past 10 years, while the others have drifting to different rankings. Second is that “Hey guys” is not universal – it all depends on the industry you’re in. For instance, “Ladies and gentleman” is most used in tech vlogs while “What is going on” is #1 in sports vlogs and “What’s up” in fitness vlogs.
The opening words of a video are really important in that it sets the tone for the video and eventually can become a signature sign-on. Greetings and endings when doing presentations are so personal though, and it seems like everyone finds what they like and stay with it thereafter. I know that I usually use “Welcome to . . (name of presentation or podcast)” and I don’t think I’ve varied from that once in hundreds of presentations.
English isn’t the only language of YouTube, of course, but there’s a familiar flavor to greetings across the world. In Brazil, the top greeting on YouTube is “Oi gente,” which translates to, you guessed it, “Hey guys” in Portuguese. Likewise, Mexican creators use “Hola amigos,” while, in France, they prefer a cheerful “Bonjour à tous,” or “Hello to all.”
Regardless of what signature presenter greeting you use, chances are that if you use it once, you’ll use it again and again after that.
