Demystifying Astrological Content on Social Media Platforms: A Thematic Analytical Approach

Abstract

This research paper is an attempt towards comparing the popular astrological content on Instagram and YouTube Shorts and exploring the nature of contents covered at greater depth. The astrological contents have gained a lot of traction in recent times due to multiple factors at work. The people's narcissistic tendencies have been on the rise ever since the advent of social media. This has led to a greater self-consciousness and a sense of self-important. People now are interested in knowing more about themselves albeit at a very shallow level. The desire is not to immerse deeply into one self, rather the focus is on having access to quick and easy information based on how a person born on a specific date or born in a particular month would behave and would be perceived by the others. This tendency of the people clubbed with the very innate nature of the short reel-based platforms subsequently results in a plethora of content and equal number of content consumers. Looking into its commercial aspect, astrological contents on the digital platforms in India has seen a logarithmic growth in the past few years. According to some studies, the global Astrology App market size is valued at USD 3856.06 million in 2024 and will continue to rise during the forecast period at a CAGR of 16.82%, reaching USD 9800.41 million by 2031. Hence, to explore nature of content on the two popular short reel-based platform, thematic analysis was done on 385 social media posts of popular astrologers. The study employed a thematic approach of qualitative analysis to explore the deeper layers of the contents. For the purpose of the study, the content was categorized primarily into the nature of astrological science displayed and aspect of life being talked about. Further upon the exploration of the content, other sub-categories were developed. The findings showed a tilt towards a specific type of content.