Stochastic dynamics and the predictability of big hits in online videos

The competition for the attention of users is a central element of the Internet. Crucial issues are the origin and predictability of big hits, the few items that capture a big portion of the total attention. We address these issues analyzing 10 million time series of videos' views from YouTube. We find that the average gain of views is linearly proportional to the number of views a video already has, in agreement with usual rich-get-richer mechanisms and Gibrat's law, but this fails to explain the prevalence of big hits. The reason is that the fluctuations around the average views are themselves heavy tailed. Based on these empirical observations, we propose a stochastic differential equation with L\'evy noise as a model of the dynamics of videos. We show how this model is substantially better in estimating the probability of an ordinary item becoming a big hit, which is considerably underestimated in the traditional proportional-growth models.Comment: Manuscript (8 pages and 5 figures

Online videos: The hidden curriculum

Introduction: Dental undergraduates will access the Internet searching for learning materials to complement their training; however, open access content is not generally recommended by dental schools. This study aimed to evaluate how dental students are using online video content. Materials and Methods: Students from eight Universities (Athens, Birmingham, Brescia, Cardiff, Melbourne, Paris, Sao Paulo and Valdivia) representing three continents were invited to complete a survey on their access and learning from online videos. Results: International students behave similarly when studying dental content online. Of 515 respondents, 94.6% use the Internet as a learning tool. It was observed that videos are not frequently recommended during didactic lectures (9.6%). But many students (79.9%) will use YouTube for their learning which includes clinical procedures. Students will check online content before performing procedures for the first time (74.8%), to understand what was explained in class (65.9%) or read in books (59.5%), to relearn clinical techniques (64.7%) and to visualise rare procedures (49.8%). More than half of the students do not fully trust the accuracy or the reliability of online content. This does not prevent students from watching and sharing dental videos with classmates (64.4%). The content watched is not shared with teachers (23.3%) even when it contradicts what was learnt in the school (38.2%). Conclusion: This study concludes that students regularly integrate open access digital resources into learning portfolios but are hesitant to inform their teachers about their viewing habits. Students wish to receive critical skills on how to evaluate the material they encounter outside their traditional learning space

A visualization tool for violent scenes detection

We present a browser-based visualization tool that allows users to explore movies and online videos based on the violence level of these videos. The system offers visualizations of annotations and results of the MediaEval 2012 Affect Task and can interactively download and analyze content from video hosting sites like YouTube

Characterizing popularity dynamics of online videos

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

Social Networking and Online Videos Take Off: Internet's Broader Role in Campaign 2008

Presents findings from a survey on presidential campaign news and political communication, with a focus on the Internet's growing role, by news source, generation, sites, and party. Also tracks views on media bias and the Iraq war

ISIS rhetoric: A war of online videos

In an attempt to combat ISIS recruitment videos, the United States Department of State (USDS) developed the Think Again, Turn Away social media campaign featuring videos attempting to persuade viewers to resist the message of ISIS. In the article “U.S. government: A war of online video propaganda,” authors William Allendorfer and Susan Herring (2015) analyze the textual rhetoric of the ISIS video series Flames of War in comparison to eight Think Again, Turn Away videos. To add to Allendorfer and Herring’s (2015) textual analysis, this study uses the framework of scholar David Blakesley’s (2004) four elements of film rhetoric (language, ideology, interpretation, and identification) to complete a visual analysis of the ISIS video “No Respite” and the Think Again, Turn Away video, “#WhyTheyLeftDaesh.” From this visual analysis, I argue that ISIS attempts to make their organization seem larger than it is, the USDS lacks a dichotomy in message, and ISIS seems to utilize images relatable to the target audience. Ultimately, this study found that ISIS propaganda tends to have a stronger impact than the USDS. This study is limited because the audience impact and reception cannot be fully measured