Communications of the ACM
Bowling alone: the collapse and revival of American community
CSCW '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Information Systems Research
Investigating New Product Diffusion Across Products and Countries
Marketing Science
Social Computing: From Social Informatics to Social Intelligence
IEEE Intelligent Systems
I tube, you tube, everybody tubes: analyzing the world's largest user generated content video system
Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement
Video suggestion and discovery for youtube: taking random walks through the view graph
Proceedings of the 17th international conference on World Wide Web
Predicting the popularity of online content
Communications of the ACM
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World
Moderated Online Communities and Quality of User-Generated Content
Journal of Management Information Systems
Organizing for Innovation in the Digitized World
Organization Science
The Effects of Rewarding User Engagement: The Case of Facebook Apps
Information Systems Research
Content Contribution for Revenue Sharing and Reputation in Social Media: A Dynamic Structural Model
Journal of Management Information Systems
Hi-index | 0.00 |
This paper is motivated by the success of YouTube, which is attractive to content creators as well as corporations for its potential to rapidly disseminate digital content. The networked structure of interactions on YouTube and the tremendous variation in the success of videos posted online lends itself to an inquiry of the role of social influence. Using a unique data set of video information and user information collected from YouTube, we find that social interactions are influential not only in determining which videos become successful but also on the magnitude of that impact. We also find evidence for a number of mechanisms by which social influence is transmitted, such as (i) a preference for conformity and homophily and (ii) the role of social networks in guiding opinion formation and directing product search and discovery. Econometrically, the problem in identifying social influence is that individuals' choices depend in great part upon the choices of other individuals, referred to as the reflection problem. Another problem in identification is to distinguish between social contagion and user heterogeneity in the diffusion process. Our results are in sharp contrast to earlier models of diffusion, such as the Bass model, that do not distinguish between different social processes that are responsible for the process of diffusion. Our results are robust to potential self-selection according to user tastes, temporal heterogeneity and the reflection problem. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed.