The Untold Story of the Clones: Content-agnostic Factors that Impact\n YouTube Video Popularity

Abstract

Video dissemination through sites such as YouTube can have widespread impacts\non opinions, thoughts, and cultures. Not all videos will reach the same\npopularity and have the same impact. Popularity differences arise not only\nbecause of differences in video content, but also because of other\n"content-agnostic" factors. The latter factors are of considerable interest but\nit has been difficult to accurately study them. For example, videos uploaded by\nusers with large social networks may tend to be more popular because they tend\nto have more interesting content, not because social network size has a\nsubstantial direct impact on popularity. In this paper, we develop and apply a\nmethodology that is able to accurately assess, both qualitatively and\nquantitatively, the impacts of various content-agnostic factors on video\npopularity. When controlling for video content, we observe a strong linear\n"rich-get-richer" behavior, with the total number of previous views as the most\nimportant factor except for very young videos. The second most important factor\nis found to be video age. We analyze a number of phenomena that may contribute\nto rich-get-richer, including the first-mover advantage, and search bias\ntowards popular videos. For young videos we find that factors other than the\ntotal number of previous views, such as uploader characteristics and number of\nkeywords, become relatively more important. Our findings also confirm that\ninaccurate conclusions can be reached when not controlling for content.\n