Does Content Determine Information Popularity in Social Media? A Case Study of YouTube Videos' Content and their Popularity

摘要

We here investigate what drives the popularity of information on social media platforms. Focusing on YouTube, we seek to understand the extent to which content by itself determines a video's popularity. Using mechanical turk as experimental platform, we asked users to evaluate pairs of videos, and compared users' relative perception of the videos' content against their relative popularity reported by YouTube. We found that in most evaluations users could not reach consensus on which video had better content as their perceptions tend to be very subjective. Nevertheless, when consensus was reached, the video with preferred content almost always achieved greater popularity on YouTube, highlighting the importance of content in driving information popularity on social media.