Content Popularity Evolution in Online Social Networks

Understanding content popularity growth on Online Social Networks (OSNs) is of great importance to Internet service providers, content creators and online marketers. However, most previous studies of OSNs are based on static views of the system, thus neglecting the temporal evolution of the network, and a possible correlation with content popularity growth. Moreover, previous analyses also greatly neglect the impact of the referrers (i.e., incoming links from external sites) on content popularity. We here provide some initial results on the analysis of content popularity growth in YouTube videos. Our study is based on three video datasets, namely popular videos, randomly collected videos, and copyright protected videos, with distinct characteristics in terms of temporal popularity evolution. We also characterize the different referrers that most often lead users to YouTube videos. Our results shed some light into aspects that impact content popularity growth.