Catching a viral video
Venue
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems (2011), pp. 1-19
Publication Year
2011
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
millions of YouTube videos. The socialness of a video is quantified by classifying
the referrer sources for video views as social (e.g. an emailed link, Facebook
referral) or non-social (e.g. a link from related videos). We find that viewership
patterns of highly social videos are very different from 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. By using our
insights on viral videos we are able develop a method for ranking blogs and
websites on their ability to spread viral videos.
