Analysis and Prediction of Content Popularity for Online Video Service: A Youku Case Study

Understanding the characteristics and predicting the popularity of the newly published online videos can provide direct implications in various contexts such as service design, advertisement planning, network management and etc. In this paper, we collect a real-world large-scale dataset from a leading online video service provider in China, namely Youku. We first analyze the dynamics of content publication and content popularity for the online video service. Then, we propose a rich set of features and exploit various effective classification methods to estimate the future popularity level of an individual video in various scenarios. We show that the future popularity level of a video can be predicted even before the video's release, and by introducing the historical popularity information the prediction performance can be improved dramatically. In addition, we investigate the importance of each feature group and each feature in the popularity prediction, and further reveal the factors that may impact the video popularity. We also discuss how the early monitoring period influences the popularity level prediction. Our work provides an insight into the popularity of the newly published online videos, and demonstrates promising practical applications for content publishers, service providers, online advisers and network operators.