Abstract:
Social media platforms have begun to be quite widely used as alternatives of the conventional media among the young in the recent years. The ratings and number of users of YouTube - a social media platform established in 2005 for image recording, storage, and sharing - worldwide and in Turkey have increased depending on the change in the mobile use habits as well as on the flourishing of smartphones. It is seen that the use of YouTube has become widespread particularly among the young in the sense of reaching information and of social interaction as well as for reputation acquisition, to become famous, and for entertainment. In this context, a survey was carried out in December 2017 to reveal the motivations of some 579 university students for use by employing the method of random sampling. As a result of the research, it was discovered that the university students used YouTube on each day of the week and for an hour to 3 hours daily to acquire information and reach alternative information, for access to alternative news broadcasting, and to obtain economic and social utility most and accessed YouTube largely by means of a laptop.
