Results for the Fourth Quarter (October-December) 2023 of video views featuring mentions of Belarusian politicians in the titles, posted on the YouTube platform during this period:
Over 60 individuals are analyzed in total.
Pavel Latushko retained the second position with a minimal difference in the number of views from Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.
Valery Sakhashchik moved up from the seventh to the fourth position. Joint media activities of Valery with Vadim Prokopyev and Andrey Yegorov led to the strengthening of their positions in this listing. They were connected by both joint offline performances and the promotion of the election agenda for the Coordination Council.
The appearance of Yuri Voskresensky is associated with his participation in BT shows together with Ksenia Lebedeva.
We will analyze Belarusian politicians who gathered the most views on YouTube in the fourth quarter, by the number of mentions in online and social media, by search query trends and their results.
Mention Frequency
Alexander Lukashenko – 118,907 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 55%, vk.com – 7%, X (twitter.com) – 5%, ok.ru – 4%, facebook.com – 4%.
Pavel Latushko – 3,093 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 75%, reform.by – 7%, facebook.com – 5%, vk.com – 4%, X (twitter.com) – 2%.
Svetlana Tikhanovskaya – 12,975 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 59%, facebook.com – 10%, reform.by – 10%, vk.com – 7%, X (twitter.com) – 6%.
Valery Sakhashchik – 361 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 64%, reform.by – 8%, facebook.com – 6%, vk.com – 6%, euroradio.by – 4%.
Vadim Prokopyev – 804 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 70%, reform.by – 5%, vk.com – 5%, facebook.com – 3%, X (twitter.com) – 2%.
Zenon Poznyak – 1,207 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 70%, facebook.com – 13%, vk.com – 3%, X (twitter.com) – 1%, sb.by – 1%, belta.by – 1%.
Viktor Babariko – 1,709 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: youtube.com – 46%, facebook.com – 13%, vk.com – 9%, reform.by – 8%, X (twitter.com) – 6%.
Yuri Voskresensky – 318 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: vk.com – 28%, youtube.com – 22%, facebook.com – 17%, ok.ru – 10%, ctv.by – 3%.
Roman Golovchenko – 5,361 mentions.
Main sources of mentions: vk.com – 12%, belta.by – 7%, reform.by – 7%, youtube.com – 5%, ok.ru – 5%, sb.by – 5%.
Search Query Results
Let’s evaluate the results in Belarus for search queries of the studied Belarusian politicians in the Google search engine.
The expected frequency for the query “Lukashenko” is about 40.5 thousand queries per month:
Interestingly, out of these top ten results, the search query will be on Russian media sources.
The number of “Tikhanovskaya” queries in Belarus is expected to be around three thousand per month. The result will be as follows:
Also in the top ten are four Russian media resources and almost completely absent are Belarusian independent media. It is believed that due to the blocking of sites of Belarusian independent media in Belarus, Google lowers their rank in the search results.
The search for “Latushko” is expected to be around 1,600 queries per month.
The expected number of “Sakhashchik” queries is 880 per month.
Russian news resources are almost absent in the results.
The expected number of “Prokopyev” queries is 260 per month
Queries for “Poznyak” are expected to be around 880 per month:
Here, a large number of results are not related to the politician – Zenon Poznyak.
The expected number of “Babariko” queries is 130 per month:
Very high positions in the search results of Russian resources.
In the results for the query “Yegorov,” none of the first twenty results are related to Andrey Yegorov, the spokesperson for the Coordination Council, positioned as a proto-parliament.
The number of “Voskresensky” queries is planned to be around one thousand per month. But the top positions are not related to the Belarusian figure, but to a Russian actor:
The expected number of “Golovchenko” queries is 1,600 per month:
Of course, this is all propped up by the bureaucratic system of the current regime, which informationally accompanies the high-ranking official.
For comparison, we will present the predicted number of queries (frequency) for popular informational topics. For example, the query “weather forecast” will be made 90.5 thousand times a month, the query “currency exchange rate” more than 200 thousand times.
It is expected that the interested parties in the media coverage of Belarusian political actors, who are concerned with reaching target audiences in Belarus, will pay great attention to the traditional promotion of various information resources in the search query results.
Previous Months:
- Belarusian Politicians in the Third Quarter of 2023
- Belarusian Politicians, June 2023
- Belarusian Politicians, May 2023
- Belarusian Politicians, April 2023
- Belarusian Politicians, March 2023
- Belarusian Politicians, February 2023
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, January 2023
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, December 2022
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, November 2022
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, October 2022
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, September 2022
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, August 2022
- Belarusian Politicians on YouTube, July 2022
The publication was prepared by the Baltic Internet Policy Initiative.
