Title

Catching a Viral Video

Authors

T Broxton
Yannet Interian, University of San FranciscoFollow
J Vaver
M Wattenhofer

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2013

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.

Comments

This work is the author manuscript of an article published by Springer Verlag.

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10844-011-0191-2.

DOI

10.1007/s10844-011-0191-2

Recommended Citation

Broxton, T., Interian, Y., Vaver, J., & Wattenhofer, M. (2013). Catching a viral video. Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, 40(2), 241-259. DOI: 10.1007/s10844-011-0191-2