Participatory Culture and Tourist Experience: Promoting Destinations Through YouTube

Social media tools are viewed as important sources for the tourism sector and different types of consumers and travellers. This article presents the role and the impact of YouTube, as the main video sharing solution in the online environment, for the development of what is called prosumer, the user which generates, circulates and consumes online knowledge and being part of the participatory culture. The goal of this research is to investigate the extent to which social media and YouTube in particular appear to be part of the spreadable media phenomenon, the capacity of the information to be shared among users. The study used a research design by selecting the first 100 video clips promoted by YouTube and addressing the theme of Bran Castle (also known as Dracula Castle) from Braşov, Transylvania region in Romania, uploaded by different categories of users. For the analysis of the results, this paper used elements of descriptive statistics from YouTube and methods of quantitative content analysis, regarding the YouTube video characteristics such as the frequencies of views, comments, appreciations (likes, dislikes), channel subscribers etc. This study shows that YouTube is considered to be important for the development of the tourist industry as it provides travellers with new practices for choosing their destination after viewing video materials.