Catching a Viral Video
Venue
IEEE SIASP@ICDM 2010
Publication Year
2010
Authors
Tom Broxton, Yannet Interian, Jon Vaver, Mirjam Wattenhofer
BibTeX
Abstract
The sharing and re-sharing of videos on social sites, blogs e-mail, and other means
has given rise to the phenomenon of viral videos – videos that become popular
through internet sharing. In this paper we seek to better understand viral videos
on YouTube by analyzing sharing and its relationship to video popularity using 1.5
million YouTube videos. The socialness of a video is quantified by classifying the
referrer sources for video views as social (e.g. an emailed link) or non-social
(e.g. a link from related videos). By segmenting videos according to their fraction
of social views, we find that viewership patterns of highly social videos is very
different than less social videos. For example, the highly social videos rise to,
and fall from, their peak popularity more quickly than less social videos. We also
find that not all highly social videos become popular, and not all popular videos
are highly social. And, despite their ability to generate large volumes of views
over a short period of time, only 21% of the most popular videos (in terms of
30-day views) can be classified as viral. The observations made here lay the ground
work for future work related to the creation of classification and predictive
models for online videos.
