Boosting video popularity through keyword suggestion and recommendation systems

YouTube offers a great opportunity for people to entertain, advertise, gain popularity, and generate revenue. How to increase views for a video has become the key question for anyone who wish to be famous or gain more revenue. Recognizing that a recommendation system is a major view source for videos, our goal in this paper is to increase video views in YouTube by leveraging on the recommendation system. We first perform measurements to understand how views are propagated among videos through recommendation links and identify factors that influence the recommendation produced by the system. Our measurement results show that similarity in video meta-data is a crucial ingredient in connecting videos. We then propose a keyword suggestion method for a video with the aim to raise video views through the recommendation system. The keyword suggestion method utilizes video clusters on a referrer video graph to obtain relevant keywords and ranks keywords based on both their relevance and their potential to attract video views. The effectiveness of the keyword suggestion method is demonstrated through a case study, showing that using the keywords suggested by our method leads to a larger number of video views and higher average watching time per video playback compared to initial user-given keywords.