Trending Videos: Measurement and Analysis

Unlike popular videos, which would have already achieved high viewership numbers by the time they are declared popular, YouTube trending videos represent content that targets viewers’ attention over a relatively short time, and has the potential of becoming popular. Despite their importance and visibility, YouTube trending videos have not been studied or analyzed thoroughly. In this paper, we present our findings for measuring, analyzing, and comparing key aspects of YouTube trending videos. Our study is based on collecting and monitoring high-resolution time-series of the viewership and related statistics of more than 8,000 YouTube videos over an aggregate period of nine months. Since trending videos are declared as such just several hours after they are uploaded, we are able to analyze trending videos’ time-series across critical and sufficiently-long durations of their lifecycle. In addition, we analyze the profile of users who upload trending videos, to potentially identify the role that these users’ profile plays in getting their uploaded videos trending. Furthermore, we conduct a directional-relationship analysis among all pairs of trending videos’ time-series that we have monitored. We employ Granger Causality (GC) with significance testing to conduct this analysis. Unlike traditional correlation measures, our directional-relationship analysis provides a deeper insight onto the viewership pattern of different categories of trending videos. Our findings include the following. Trending videos and their channels have clear distinct statistical attributes when compared to other YouTube content that has not been labeled as trending. Based on the GC measure, the viewership of nearly all trending videos has some level of directional-relationship with other trending videos in our dataset. Our results also reveal a highly asymmetric directional-relationship among different categories of trending videos. Our directionality analysis also shows a clear pattern of viewership toward popular categories, whereas some categories tend to be isolated with little evidence of transitions among them.