Abstract
Online popularity has an 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 interevent 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.
Keywords
empirical analysis, Wikipedia
Subject Categories
Popularity, Internet
Disciplines
Physics
Publisher
American Physical Society
Publication Date
10-8-2010
Rights Information
©2010 American Physical Society
Rights Holder
American Physical Society
Permanent URL
Recommended Citation
Ratkiewicz, Jacob; Fortunato, Santo; Flammini, Alessandro; Menczer, Filippo; and Vespignani, Alessandro, "Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity" (2010). Physics Faculty Publications. Paper 183. http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002143
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Characterizing and modeling the dynamics of online popularity supp.pdf (116 kB)Figure 1
Notes
Originally published in Physical Review Letters, v.105 no.15 (2010), 158701. DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.158701. Dr. Vespignani is affiliated with Northeastern University as of the time of deposit.