Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity
Abstract
Online popularity has enormous impact on opinions, culture, policy, and profits. We provide a quantitative, large scale, temporal analysis of the dynamics of online content popularity in two massive model systems, the Wikipedia and an entire country's Web space. We find that the dynamics of popularity are characterized by bursts, displaying characteristic features of critical systems such as fat-tailed distributions of magnitude and inter-event time. We propose a minimal model combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors. The model recovers the critical features observed in the empirical analysis of the systems analyzed here, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1005.2704,
title = {Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity},
author = {Jacob Ratkiewicz and Filippo Menczer and Santo Fortunato and Alessandro Flammini and Alessandro Vespignani},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1005.2704},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
5 pages, 4 figures. Modeling part detailed. Final version published in Physical Review Letters