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New Song Quickly Spreads

A new music video, It’s Thanksgiving by Nicole Westbrook, was released last week on YouTube on November 7th.  Since being released, the video has already accumulated around eight million views.  Many popular videos on YouTube have had similar growth rates, getting a million views or more per day.  This popularity can occur for various reasons.  The video might be really funny, good, bad, or contain someone very famous just to name a few.  Links from other popular social networking sites such as Facebook can also help to increase the growth in popularity of these YouTube videos.

One explanation of why these certain videos become so popular (because not every video on YouTube gets millions of views) is that the authority score of these videos is a lot higher than that of other videos.  Videos from YouTube can be shared on other social networking sites such as Facebook.  When a video is shared on Facebook, the authority of that video increases as another page points to it.  As friends of the original poster see the video on Facebook, they also watch and share the video, thus increasing the authority of the video even more.  This increase in the number of places the video can be seen (essentially the authority score of the video) makes the video get tons of views.

Another interesting aspect of YouTube videos is the like/dislike button available for each video.  It’s Thanksgiving, even though it is so popular with over eight million views in a week, has many more dislikes than likes.  The number of dislikes is more than seven times the number of likes.  This is similar to an information cascade.  As more people watch the video and see that other people are saying bad things about it and the dislike counter is increasing, they will be much more likely to also hit the dislike button, or nothing, so as not to go against what everyone else is saying about the video.  The progression of views and likes/dislikes on YouTube videos and which videos receive millions of views is very interesting to see.

-Spader

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