The untold story of the clones: content-agnostic factors that impact YouTube video popularity

Video dissemination through sites such as YouTube can have widespread impacts on opinions, thoughts, and cultures. Not all videos will reach the same popularity and have the same impact. Popularity differences arise not only because of differences in video content, but also because of other “content-agnostic” factors. The latter factors are of considerable interest but it has been difficult to accurately study them. For example, videos uploaded by users with large social networks may tend to be more popular because they tend to have more interesting content, not because social network size has a substantial direct impact on popularity. In this paper, we develop and apply a methodology that is able to accurately assess, both qualitatively and quantitatively, the impacts of various content-agnostic factors on video popularity. When controlling for video content, we observe a strong linear “rich-get-richer” behavior, with the total number of previous views as the most important...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: KDD
• Authors: Youmna Borghol, Sebastien Ardon, Niklas Carlsson, Derek L. Eager, Anirban Mahanti
• Keywords: Computer Systems Organization, Data Mining, Inaccurate Conclusions, Information Storage And Retrieval, KDD 2012