  The Internet has significantly affected the increase of social media users.
Nowadays, informative content is presented along with entertainment on the web.
Highlighting environmental issues on social networks is crucial, given their
significance as major global problems. This study examines the popularity
determinants for short environmental videos on social media, focusing on the
comparative influence of raw video features and viewer engagement metrics. We
collected a dataset of videos along with associated popularity metrics such as
likes, views, shares, and comments per day. We also extracted video
characteristics, including duration, text post length, emotional and sentiment
analysis using the VADER and text2emotion models, and color palette brightness.
Our analysis consisted of two main experiments: one evaluating the correlation
between raw video features and popularity metrics and another assessing the
impact of viewer comments and their sentiments and emotions on video
popularity. We employed a ridge regression classifier with standard scaling to
predict the popularity, categorizing videos as popular or not based on the
median views and likes per day. The findings reveal that viewer comments and
reactions (accuracy of 0.8) have a more substantial influence on video
popularity compared to raw video features (accuracy of 0.67). Significant
correlations include a positive relationship between the emotion of sadness in
posts and the number of likes and negative correlations between sentiment
scores, and both likes and shares. This research highlights the complex
relationship between content features and public perception in shaping the
popularity of environmental messages on social media.
