Video dissemination through sites such as YouTube can have widespread impactson opinions, thoughts, and cultures. Not all videos will reach the samepopularity and have the same impact. Popularity differences arise not onlybecause of differences in video content, but also because of other"content-agnostic" factors. The latter factors are of considerable interest butit has been difficult to accurately study them. For example, videos uploaded byusers with large social networks may tend to be more popular because they tendto have more interesting content, not because social network size has asubstantial direct impact on popularity. In this paper, we develop and apply amethodology that is able to accurately assess, both qualitatively andquantitatively, the impacts of various content-agnostic factors on videopopularity. When controlling for video content, we observe a strong linear"rich-get-richer" behavior, with the total number of previous views as the mostimportant factor except for very young videos. The second most important factoris found to be video age. We analyze a number of phenomena that may contributeto rich-get-richer, including the first-mover advantage, and search biastowards popular videos. For young videos we find that factors other than thetotal number of previous views, such as uploader characteristics and number ofkeywords, become relatively more important. Our findings also confirm thatinaccurate conclusions can be reached when not controlling for content.
展开▼
