Characterizing popularity dynamics of online videos

• A temporal analysis of the popularity dynamics in two online video-provided websites.
• Dynamics of the online video popularity can be characterized by the burst behaviors.
• The burst behaviors typically occur in the early life span of videos.
• Lately the online video popularity restricts to the classic preferential mechanism.

Online popularity has a major impact on videos, music, news and other contexts in online systems. Characterizing online popularity dynamics is nature to explain the observed properties in terms of the already acquired popularity of each individual. In this paper, we provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the popularity dynamics in two online video-provided websites, namely MovieLens and Netflix. The two collected data sets contain over 100 million records and even span a decade. We characterize that the popularity dynamics of online videos evolve over time, and find that the dynamics of the online video popularity can be characterized by the burst behaviors, typically occurring in the early life span of a video, and later restricting to the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism.