Modeling and predicting the popularity of online content is a significant problem for the practice of information dissemination, advertising, and consumption. Recent work analyzing massive datasets advances our understanding of popularity, but one major gap remains: To precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. This work supplies the missing link between exogenous inputs from public social media platforms, such as Twitter, and endogenous responses within the content platform, such as YouTube. We develop a novel mathematical model, the Hawkes intensity process, which can explain the complex popularity history of each video according to its type of content, network of diffusion, and sensitivity to promotion. Our model supplies a prototypical description of videos, called an endo-exo map. This map explains popularity as the result of an extrinsic factor -- the amount of promotions from the outside world that the video receives, acting upon two intrinsic factors -- sensitivity to promotion, and inherent virality. We use this model to forecast future popularity given promotions on a large 5-months feed of the most-tweeted videos, and found it to lower the average error by 28.6% from approaches based on popularity history. Finally, we can identify videos that have a high potential to become viral, as well as those for which promotions will have hardly any effect.

Modeling and predicting the popularity of online content is a significant problem for the practice of information dissemination, advertising, and consumption. Recent work analyzing massive datasets advances our understanding of popularity, but one major gap remains: To precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. This work supplies the missing link between exogenous inputs from public social media platforms, such as Twitter, and endogenous responses within the content platform, such as YouTube. We develop a novel mathematical model, the Hawkes intensity process, which can explain the complex popularity history of each video according to its type of content, network of diffusion, and sensitivity to promotion. Our model supplies a prototypical description of videos, called an endo-exo map. This map explains popularity as the result of an extrinsic factor - the amount of promotions from the outside world that the video receives, acting upon two intrinsic factors - sensitivity to promotion, and inherent virality. We use this model to forecast future popularity given promotions on a large 5-months feed of the most-tweeted videos, and found it to lower the average error by 28.6% from approaches based on popularity history. Finally, we can identify videos that have a high potential to become viral, as well as those for which promotions will have hardly any effect.

Explaining and predicting the popularity of online multimedia content is an important problem for the practice of information dissemination and consumption. Recent work advances our understanding of popularity, but one important gap remains: to precisely quantify the relationship between the popularity of an online item and the external promotions it receives. This work supplies the missing link between exogenous inputs from public social media platforms (Twitter) and endogenous responses within video content platforms (Youtube). This is done via a novel mathematical model, the Hawkes intensity process, which is able to explain the complex popularity history of each video according to its content, network, and sensitivity to promotion. This model supplies a prototypical description of videos, called an endo-exo map, which allows us to explain the popularity as the joint effects of two intrinsic measures and the amount of discussions from the outside world. This model also allows us to forecast the effects of future promotions more accurately than approaches based on popularity history alone, and to identify videos that have a high potential to become viral, or those for which promotions will have hardly any effect.

We study what drives the popularity of cultural items, by computationally quantifying a video's potential to become viral. We propose to model popularity lifecycles as the endogenous response to exogenous stimuli, dubbed Hawkes intensity process. This model can explain the complex, multi-phase, longitudinal popularity of a Youtube video. Moreover, it can also forecast the future popularity, outperforming the state-of-the-art method. Finally, we characterize the susceptibility of a video to become popular through two parameters corresponding to the strength of its exogenous and endogenous response, respectively. The adequacy of the model for these tasks is validated on a dataset of the most Tweeted and shared videos over 6 months.

This paper proposes a new representation to explain and predict popularity evolution in social media. Recent work on social networks has led to insights about the popularity of a digital item. For example, both the content and the network matters, and gaining early popularity is critical. However, these observations did not paint a full picture of popularity evolution; some open questions include: what kind of popularity trends exist among different types of videos, and will an unpopular video become popular? To this end, we propose a novel phase representation that extends the well-known endogenous growth and exogenous shock model (Crane and Sornette 2008). We further propose efficient algorithms to simultaneously estimate and segment power-law shaped phases from historical popularity data. With the extracted phases, we found that videos go through not one, but multiple stages of popularity increase or decrease over many months. On a dataset containing the 2-year history of over 172,000 YouTube videos, we observe that phases are directly related to content type and popularity change, e.g., nearly 3/4 of the top 5% popular videos have 3 or more phases, more than 60% news videos are dominated by one long power-law decay, and 75% of videos that made a significant jump to become the most popular videos have been in increasing phases. Finally, we leverage this phase representation to predict future viewcount gain and found that using phase information reduces the average prediction error over the state-of-the-art for videos of all phase shapes.

This paper proposes a novel method to predict increases in YouTube viewcount driven from the Twitter social network. Specifically, we aim to predict two types of viewcount increases: a sudden increase in viewcount (named as Jump), and the viewcount shortly after the upload of a new video (named as Early). Experiments on hundreds of thousands of videos and millions of tweets show that Twitter-derived features alone can predict whether a video will be in the top 5% for Early popularity with 0.7 Precision@100. Furthermore, our results reveal that while individual influence is indeed important for predicting how Twitter drives YouTube views, it is a diversity of interest from the most active to the least active Twitter users mentioning a video (measured by the variation in their total activity) that is most informative for both Jump and Early prediction. In summary, by going beyond features that quantify individual influence and additionally leveraging collective features of activity variation, we are able to obtain an effective cross-network predictor of Twitter-driven YouTube views.