The Untold Story of the Clones: Content-agnostic Factors that Impact YouTube Video Popularity

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An electronic version of this paper can be downloaded here: [1]

Summary

This paper develops and applies a methodology for assessing the impacts of various content-agnostic factors (e.g. total view counts, uploader followers, video age, etc.) on video popularity. To evaluate the relative influence of different factors, three statistical tools are used: 1) PCA for grouping of variables responsible for the popularity variation, 2) Correlation and collinearity analysis for identifying interrelated variables, and 3) Multi-linear regression with variable selection for identifying most informative variables. The dataset they used contains 48 clone sets of Youtube videos with three types of information: video statistics, historical view count, and influential events.