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.
['Marian-Andrei Rizoiu', 'Lexing Xie', 'Scott Sanner', 'Manuel Cebrian', 'Honglin Yu', 'Pascal Van Hentenryck']
Can this video be promoted? - Endogenous and exogenous popularity processes in social media