Characterizing and Modeling the Dynamics of Online Popularity
Physical Review LettersPublished 8 October 2010Open access
A. Ratkiewicz, Santo Fortunato, Alessandro Flammini, Filippo Menczer, Alessandro Vespignani
Citations251
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score2.86
SNIP2.41
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TL;DR
A minimal model is proposed combining the classic preferential popularity increase mechanism with the occurrence of random popularity shifts due to exogenous factors, highlighting the key factors needed in the description of popularity dynamics.
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
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