Identifying and Characterizing Sleeping Beauties on YouTube

The generally accepted notion about popularity dynamics of user generated contents (e.g., tweets, videos) is that such contents attain their peak popularity within first few days and then gradually fade into oblivion. However, analyzing more than 350K videos on YouTube, we find that more than 10% of them obtain their peak popularity after at least one year from being uploaded. We term such videos as Sleeping Beauties and observe that these videos engage users more compared to other videos on YouTube. We further observe that sleeping beauties can retain their popularity to a greater extent following their peak popularity compared to other videos. We believe that recognizing such videos will not only benefit the advertisers, but also the designers of recommendation systems who seek to maximize user satisfaction. Through this interactive poster, we bring the presence and characteristics of sleeping beauties in front of the research community.